New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and founder of small, indie tech businesses. I’m currently working on a book called Refactoring English: Effective Writing for Software Developers. Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my book and my professional life overall. Highlights I’m running late on my book. A great blog post inspired me to think more about convenience shell scripts. The game Oxygen Not Included is fun. Goal grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and founder of small, indie tech businesses. I’m currently working on a book called Refactoring English: Effective Writing for Software Developers. Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my book and my professional life overall. Highlights I’m experimenting with low-investment, low-payoff-style blog posts. I’m adjusting my strategy for freelance editing to work specifically with people who have read my book. My intuition was way off about the odds of reaching the front page of Hacker News. Goal grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and founder of small, indie tech businesses. I’m currently working on a book called Refactoring English: Effective Writing for Software Developers. Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my book and my professional life overall. Highlights I got useful feedback from early readers about my chapter list. I found it frustrating to edit video of an interview but had fun creating a written transcript. My plan to promote my freelance blog editing services went better than I expected. Goal grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and founder of small, indie tech businesses. I’m currently working on a book called Refactoring English: Effective Writing for Software Developers. Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my book and my professional life overall. Highlights I find that not every reader who purchases early access to my book wants to give me feedback about rough drafts. I figure out where all my time is going and think of ways to minimize time drains. I spend 10 hours reimplementing a web app from scratch that originally took me 300 hours to build. I continue to learn functional programming with Gleam, but I might be cheating. Goal grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

I recently returned a product to goHardDrive, a merchant that specializes in selling used hard drives. During the return process, I discovered that they were accidentally publishing details about thousands of their customers, including their full names, mailing addresses, email addresses, and order details. The leak When I requested a return from goHardDrive, they assigned me a return merchandise authorization (RMA) number ending in five numeric digits. I’m not publishing my actual RMA number, but you can imagine that it was a number like this: