Leap Year Update 2024

I'm still here, but Feb, March, April, and May are my most busy seasons for work. Each year, for the past 10 years, I do an absolutely massive amount of programming during these month. It takes almost three months of preparation and planning to get it right during each cycle. When this time period expires, I force myself to stop for the rest of the year. Why? Because long periods of heavy technical work are counter-productive and unhealthy. Trust me, I know from experience - if you just code and code and code... you're asking for problems! Few can do it and maintain any sense of normalcy in their lives. I certainly can't. So the block is happening now.

What have I improved this year? A lot so far, but much more is in the works. For one, our commercial-quality CMS and website builder product is coming out of Alpha and entering a controlled Beta. The product is running on this site right now. No website builders active, just the one developed by New Entity Operations Inc. The results are becoming much stronger now. But it's in the 4th generation now - meaning 4 years of Feb, March, April, May improvements have went into it. Of course, there are also other products that are worked on during this time, but this has been one of the main systems under development. Under the hood, a lot is going on and recently we've been testing the social networking features which are exceeding my expectations. Again, they have been in development for a long time, so you have to do a little each cycle until it's close. Good to say, we're very close now.

If I miss my window, it must wait. And if it doesn't wait, it must be done according to my maximum programming hours allowed after the 4 month technical period of my year. What is the maximum daily time allowed? 2 hours. How many times can I exceed that during the remaining 8 months? I allow myself to do unlimited sessions, 3 times a month - that's it. So I get 36 additional days. Believe it or not, it makes your efforts more focused, and stronger.

How much would it cost someone to get my unlimited time for them instead of me allocating it to our products? About $12,000/Day. So it's not cheap, but it must be invested. The work is so tightly coupled and expansive at this point, that it's a fair investment each year to make.

Of course, I'm running a series of custom infrastructure options here now, and only recently unthrottled some of the more important ones for serving web assets, such as IOPS and Throughput. I have things to a level now where it would be considered industry standard, but these things can get expensive, so there is no sense to pump it up until you need to test the higher thresholds. I often consider expanding into my own infrastructure because I have the ability to do it now, but for now, those are all experiments only.

March will be a very busy technical month. A lot has to be done, including marketing work that I don't necessarily want to be doing right now as I do the technical work, but it must be done. If you're good with that sort of thing, I'm looking to get aligned and partner with new people to help bring interesting products to market. Reach out and contact me here if you think we have similar interests. My style of work is very collaborative and I don't hold back from offering my expertise openly. I'm an open book and not looking to block anyone else from also trying their own technical experiments.

I will be in DC a good amount over the next few months. If you would like to meet up, let me know and I'll put you on the itinerary.

I wouldn't say this if I didn't believe it. What I've been working on is very close to involving many additional people and I want to share the experience with others. What I'm building is meant to contribute to the state of the Internet more broadly, providing new types of networking and social options not yet available today. In the future, I will need strong peers with good ideas. I hope you decide to join me, it would be an honor to work with those of you with big ideas about the future.