Things are good. The product me and the team are working on for a client is a two week iteration from very likely stealth launch. So production deployment, always exciting! And the team is fantastic.

I can almost copy paste the livestream information, still Keybow, still Elgato Keylights. Having narrowed down the issues we ran into during the last stream and Frank having tracked them to OTP(!?) we can work around them. I can now control the lights. Now we need to improve this thing so at 13.30 CEST we will be refining the control of the lights, see the scheduled stream description for what we will try to do. Scheduled stream can be found here if you want to get notified as we go live. 

Also, Raspberry Pi released the new Raspberry Pi W 2 so I should have mine next week. And I thought I was going to do non-hardware streams next week...

The Regular Programming podcast has released its episode About Databases.

From Prosumer to Production Grade

I keep buying things for creating things, production gear. My live stream is very small, my YouTube channel is very small. I have already overspeced my setup to be way more capable than it needs to be compared to the kind of audience I have.

But that's not quite the point, not quite the reason. Production tools, software or hardware provide me headroom to aspire to do greater things, better work. They remove limits and introduce potential. I may never use that full potential and in that way it is a waste but it is also part of how I stay interested and motivated and in that way it is key to what I do.

"You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems." is a James Clear quote that goes around the productivity space. And I typically agree. I'm consistent with the parts of my creative efforts that are well systematized (this newsletter in particular, also the weekly livestream) and I'm inconsistent with many other things. I think this fascination with unlocking new tools, higher fidelities and fancier levels of operating on is the key to the other end for me.

I guess some of it is ambition. But it doesn't feel like I'm status-hungry and clawing my way towards getting rich. Money is a sort of scoreboard thing after a certain point and not the goal in itself for me. I want my logo to look great, I want my clients to be impressed by the work I do for them, I want the impression people get from my presentation in different media and platforms to be strong and high quality. I wouldn't say it is all about prestige either. That's not how I see it.

Can I do this thing?

That's the first question, at that point quality is a secondary concern. I don't recommend being too precious getting something off of the ground.

How can I make this better?

That's the second question. And sometimes better is not just production value, fidelity or polish. Sometimes it is about purifying the idea, the underlying values, the artistic merit or making it actually novel.

How good can I make this?

That's the third. What's the outer bound? How far can we go? And this I guess is where I end up buying better microphones, better cameras, a teleprompter (you'll see). This is where I want to remove the constraints and just push outward.

While you don't rise to the level of your goals, I also find it very hard to do anything without putting some aspiration in it. I've never been good at sitting still and the futures I build in my head have always been big, at the very least since my teens. Looking back, teen me would probably say I'm doing pretty good which is surprisingly delightful to think about. I think they'd argue that I should have gone for more of a cyberpunk style for this office, not enough cables dangling from the ceiling and way too few monitors with scrolling logs. But they'd get it, they'd also appreciate the assorted hardware on the shelves behind me.

Again, there is nothing accidental about the way my office is looking, at least not with the things I can control. Weird plumbing and dodgy ceiling light circuit is not in my purview. I want it to make some kind of impression. I didn't go for clean and white or something bland, I went for something that makes me happy and I think looks cool. And since I couldn't just get some cool tools to help me make the office cooler I actually brought someone in to advice and help find cool furniture.

To me, interesting and powerful tools that unlock potential are intrinsically linked with creative pursuits. I know some people do much more, with much less, and while I respect and am impressed by that it isn't a strong driver for me. I have done much with little when I've had to. But right now I don't have to. And I want to see how good I can get in these pursuits.

If you have thoughts you can reach me via lars@underjord.io or on Twitter where I'm @lawik.

Thanks for your time, I appreciate you reading this.

- Lars Wikman