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've spoken about quitting a few times before. Quitting is an amazing tool in our arsenal that we should be more comfortable in using. We're taught to never quit, but the truth is that learning when to quit is a superpower. We can never quit our ultimate goal, our destiny. That is ingrained in us. It leads us. But, it doesn't mean that it won't be delayed for us if we get distracted by shiny things along the way. The ideal situation is not to get distracted by the shiny things in the first place. But, we do. I do. Though, I'm happy to say that I don't so much lately. But, I've gotten distracted by mediocrity before because it sounded safe and I wasn't brave enough to say "No!" to. Or I had doubts about the journey I was on. And the shiny thing felt safe, even though I knew that it wasn't the right thing. My ask. The promise. Beware of the shiny objects One thing I like preaching about is that quitting is an important tool that must be used on our way to reaching our destiny. Quitting has served me well throughout my life. And I'm not talking about just quitting a job you hate. Big quits. Something you know you should be done with. Something your friends and family may think you're crazy to part ways with. But, you know in your heart of hearts that you're made for more, much more. The hardest part is quitting things that have somehow become a part of our identity. And they don't have to be things that are necessarily dragging us down. They are usually things that keep us in place and stop us from moving on to the next chapter in our journey. The trick is in realizing this. Once we do, everything becomes clearer. Closing old doors makes room for new exciting doors to open.

The 2 AM job hunt is officially over thanks to Indy AI 🚀

"I can't do this!" —— that's what my mind was telling me. I was running on the beach when that thought popped up in my head. It was pitch perfect weather. Morning. A vail of a cloud slightly blocking the full radiation of the sun. However, if meditation has taught me one thing, is help me catch my thoughts and observe them from the outside.  This particular thought was odd, because I wasn't tired, my breathing was perfect, the sun wasn't hitting me directly on any part of my body. In other words I was doing incredibly well. And luckily I immediately realized what what happening: I was bored! Realizing that, mobilized me to find ways to make it more fun and enjoyable by focusing on how I am running, how I am placing each step on the sand, trying to errect my body even taller which helped with getting re–energized, because the brain is super dumb and believes anything its master tells it (you!). Also, fooling myself into thinking I'm running for a crowd that's cheering for me made all the difference.  After a while, I did get tired and started to slow down, but realized something bigger in the process that I wanted to actually tell my son later on. When we feel we can't do something (school, business, excercise), the first thing to check is if we're simply bored with the activity on hand. And not immediately think that we're not capable or tired. If boredom is indeed the culprit, the first thing we can do is to try and make it fun and helpful. Asking —— "what do I love most about myself when doing this activity?" —— can help tremendously in re–centering our intent. The worst part about boredom is that it can lead to mini dissapointments that can turn into a full blown burnout. Going forwad I want to have more fun by focusing on the little things in the activity I'm doing and actually enjoy myself while dancing around it. In other words, not worry so much about goals and their deceptive nature, as I have already observed, but rather focus on this exact moment, as my fingers finalize this very last paragraph in this article.

p img { display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; } I recently upgraded my home TrueNAS server and migrated 18 TB of data from a 4-disk RAIDZ1 ZFS pool to a new RAIDZ2 pool. The neat part is that I did it with only three additional 8 TB disks and never transferred my data to external storage. Upgrading from RAIDZ1 to RAIDZ2 without moving data to external storage is tricky because: