Justin’s Blog

Year One

Jun 7, 2019 | 3 minutes read
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Today is the one-year anniversary of when I originally filed my paperwork to set up Professionally Ridiculous LLC. Though I’d continue to work at Valve Corporation for another week in 2018, I thought I’d reflect a little on my goals that I laid out in my post about leaving Valve and going independent.

This blog post isn’t really for anyone except me, but you can read if you want :).

I haven’t done terribly well on this front. I didn’t stream or write basically at all, and I was not as prolific as I wanted to be in podcasting.

I did launch The Commode Code and set up a home studio to do in-person recordings. However, this ended up going on an indefinite hiatus as we both got busy. We did manage to get six episodes out (two of them even had guests!), but it did provide a good learning experience. Lessons learned included:

  • Since we were approaching an inherently gendered subject, we really should have had a woman and/or non-binary person as a permanent cohost. I wanted to do this, or a least have a woman/NB guest every 2-3 episodes, but it would have made scheduling exceedingly difficult, which leads us to…
  • Scheduling is hard. Especially with a busy co-host and doing an in-person recording, it was difficult for us to find recording times that would let us keep to our schedules.
  • In-person recording is difficult to edit, because of the bleed across Microphones. I thought I could control this somewhat, but I couldn’t with the microphones and acoustics in the studio.

I’m reorganizing my home office over the next couple weeks, and part of that is making it no longer optimized for multi-mic recording. If I take on any future podcasting projects, I’ll probably want to do them remotely.

On this front, I’ve done much better. Whilst I haven’t shipped anything I’ve worked on independently, I’ve begun learning new (to me) technologies and languages including Swift, Vue, and GraphQL, and practicing more with TypeScript, JavaScript, and Python.

I’ve also picked up more contract work than I originally expected, working with System Era Softworks, Planetary Annihilation Inc., and Final Strike Games. I’ve gotten to learn more about a bunch of languages and technologies including Go, various bits of AWS, PlayFab, and Xbox Live.

My hope in the future is to not extend myself quite so hard on contract work, and to get a bit more done on personal projects. I’m starting to mess with SwiftUI this past week and am planning to continue developing one of my earlier projects, using SwiftUI for the frontend.

Overall, I think the first year of independence has worked out well for me. I’ve learned about how to balance my paid work with personal work, and some lessons around potential creative projects in the future. I’m jumping into this next year with optimism and hope that I’ll have something independently developed to show off later in the year.

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