Hello again! It’s been a year to the day since I last posted to this newsletter, and then went completely radio silent shortly after. Sorry about that! If you’ve been patiently waiting for new writings on design/leadership/AI/whatever, don’t unsubscribe immediately, there will be more writing coming, just at a somewhat slower pace than they were a year ago.
So what happened?
The nature of side projects
A few years ago I started writing on Medium with two primary principles:
Get a lot of useful information out of my head where it could help more people
Keep doing that as long as it was giving me more energy than it was taking
At the time, I was well into my middle-management career phase (a career phase that I genuinely love) but it wasn’t scratching the itch of make something → see results that I’ve always loved about design. This desire dovetailed well with design-focussed writing, which would be useful for my career through building up a personal brand, and practicing and improving my written communication (big tick for each of those).
I threw myself into it head first, and started to see some great results through the Medium partner program, which paid me for that writing, and kept the stakes a tiny bit higher than they otherwise would have been. It wasn’t the driving force, but it was a useful primary metric.
Like any creator-driven platform, it runs on recommendations, and algorithms, and those almost always end up rewarding constant creation over occasional well-written content. This was a treadmill I found myself on, and the process of coming up with articles to write, writing them, editing, and publishing them, eventually became something that was using the majority of my free time outside of work. This was fine when it was still fun, but when additional stress was added to that situation, it all compounds and it becomes a lot less fun very quickly.
I’d anticipated this, which was why I decided to spin up this newsletter. It was a format that I hoped would allow me to distance myself from that algorithmic treadmill, have a more direct connection with you all, and while not monetised immediately, maybe keep paths open to that in future.
In short, life happened, I stopped writing for a bit, and found I was enjoying life more.
More than just that though, my free time became filled very quickly with a new side project:
Game development
My last post a year ago was about the delightful details of the Playdate console, which I’d recently had delivered after over a year on the waitlist. That delight quickly transformed into a desire to make something for it, something that seems incredibly common among their small but active user base.
I’ve been a gamer most of my life, since getting a Commodore 64 when I was around 8 years old. I follow the game development industry, and various creators, through podcasts, youtube videos, blog posts, and have always enjoyed the idea of creating worlds for others to experience. I always stopped short of jumping into developing things myself because of a few reasons: My skills I felt largely weren’t applicable, and it didn’t seem like a viable career path.
Neither of those things have changed. Arguably, game dev is a worse career path than it’s ever been, with record layoffs hitting the industry, and design management doesn’t exactly help you create a game by yourself.
The thing that changed was deciding neither of those things actually mattered. This didn’t need to be my career, and even though I was approaching 40, I figured I could still learn new things.
I learned to program in Lua, and what started as “How do I draw pixels on to the screen?” evolved over a year or so into this, my upcoming first solo indie game, SpinShot.
So, can you play it? Statistically, given there are only around 70,000 playdates in the world, probably not. If you or a friend does miraculously have a Playdate, I’m on track to release it in April on Itch.io, fingers crossed.
The development journey, and my learnings from it, I will probably do some kind of post or video on in future, once the release is behind me a bit. There’s a lot, but it’s probably not what you’re here for. To keep it short for now, my takeaways are:
You can learn new things if you’re motivated to do so.
Don’t feel guilty about abandoning or putting down side projects if they aren’t giving you energy. You can always come back to them later.
So what about Clip Content?
I plan to start writing again here, albeit at a more deliberate pace (let’s aim for monthly and see how we go). The AI landscape is constantly changing, and my thoughts, excitements and concerns have evolved too since I last wrote about it. The design and leadership problems I’m solving at work have and will also be changing, leading to more lessons and things to write about.
Thanks for sticking around, talk to you all soon!
Good to see you back at it! I enjoyed this post! Good luck!
Welcome back, Steve! 🎉