This Week:
- What I’ve been doing to my software this week.
- The two very different places I camped this week in Colorado.
- The new constraint I’m dealing with right now.
October 2024
| Su | M | T | W | Th | F | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 29 | 30 | 10/1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 11/1 | 2 |
Where In The World Was I?
- 🌲 The mountains of Colorado, U.S.
- Salida, Colorado
- 🌲 More mountains of Colorado, U.S.
- 🌲 Even more mountains of Colorado, U.S.
Metrics From The Week
Sure feels mighty good to get back into a more consistent sleep routine and see those scores climb up (and just feel better), especially since I was talking about doing this ~2 weeks ago.
Business Progress Update
So last Sunday I started on this endeavor to refactor my software so that it can handle potentially hundreds of users at once.
Well, the first thing I started with was moving all my data out of JSON files and to a real database.
… and by today, I’m still not done.
There was a day, maybe Monday, when I started off the morning actually thinking that I might be able to get it all done in one day. Now I just laugh at that.
What I wasn’t expecting was to basically have to refactor my entire software’s codebase. I’ve probably touched about 90% of my code just this week.
In terms of progress, I broke it down into 5 major components (corresponding to pages on my UI): channels, comments, videos, new video ideas, and formats, then a bunch of smaller stuff (like saved objects). I’m done with channels, comments, mostly done with videos, and mostly done with all the other smaller stuff.
And the best part for you? All of this work has zero change to the UI so I don’t have any pictures to post 😂
The good news is, early tests of the new functionality has been a whole lot quicker in terms of speed of requests from the UI, so I’m hopeful!
Just use your imagination of this beautiful pristine codebase that’s super well organized and amazingly efficient.
Final Days On Top Of The Mountains
This spot was fantastic.
Another Errands Day
Headed back down to Salida to do my weekly errands. I got lunch at this Mexican place Mo’s and while we were all standing in line this car crashed into the back of a parked car right outside… then proceeded to slowly drive off 😅 No one was injured and there was literally a cop eating his burrito bowl at the restaurant so the response was pretty quick 😂
I drove east a bit and found another section of national forest to camp in.
Searching For The Next Nugget
However, when I got there, it wasn’t really what I had expected. The forest service put restrictions on camping to only designated areas and only designated camping spots within those areas. The spots I had scoped out from Google Maps were completely inaccessible by closed roads. In addition, getting in late, I didn’t get as good of a spot as I wanted.
It really wasn’t that bad, but I didn’t get to recharge my batteries as much as I had hoped, so ideally I needed more solar coverage if I were gonna stick around for another week.
I stayed a night, worked the morning, then did some ‘sploring to find a new spot.
WAY better spot. The only downside here is no cell signal, which is only a downside because I’m very low on battery. Other than that, 👌
I took a hike up this hill (shown in the picture above) to see what was up there.
That’s Pikes Peak (right outside Colorado Springs, CO), 14,115-ft high (4302m)!
Thoughts From The Week
The Grindstone
I’m gonna be completely honest with you, I wish I had more to say/show this week but this massive refactor is pretty much all I’ve done.
I mean I’m fine with it, but I just wish I could get it done quicker.
As I talked about in The work doesn’t care how you feel, this is work that just needs to get done. There are not shortcuts around it. It is required for where I want to take this. Right now it’s more about building towards the future dream/vision than it is enjoying the fun of adding new functionality and features (which I’m not doing…).
And speaking of fun, this work has been tough. It’s taken a LOT of context and learning this new way of doing things. But as I talked about in The thing that makes achievements more fulfilling, this being difficult WILL BE the reason why I feel so much more meaning when it’s done. They come together as a pair.
Chaos
I briefly mentioned some of the backstory of getting into van life in a video recently, I think it was The hardest part about living on the road. One of those things back then was wanting a bit more chaos in my life.
Well this week I’m definitely getting that fix.
It’s been partly cloudy the past couple days and I didn’t get to recharge my batteries as much as I had hoped they would while driving to this new area. Additionally, because there’s no cell signal, I can’t swap my starlink for my phone hotspot to relieve some battery.
So I’m down to slim pickin’s with my van’s house battery charge. It got to 24% this morning while working, which is about as low as I ever want to go.
Combine all this with trying to work 7-8 hours on my laptop every day and let’s just say we’re getting to the more interesting parts of this lifestyle… Just another problem to solve, we’ll see how I figure it out.
Battery Logistics
A note on my upgraded batteries:
About a month ago I upgrade my van’s house batteries from a single 170ah battery to 2x200ah batteries. At the place I was camped at 2 updates ago with all the aspens, I was dropping about net 4-5% per day (down 12%, then recharged up 8% or so). That was with FULL sun all day and sometimes swapping my afternoon session for my hotspot instead of running my starlink. (For the nerds reading this, on a max sunny day my solar panels generate about 1.5-1.6kWh, so I think I’m probably using about 1.6-1.7kWh of energy per day in TOTAL, or ~66 Watts per hour)
This rate was very close to being fully sustainable (equal or increasing charge per day), but as soon as you throw in a cloudy day or two, it’s gets to be more draining than recharging and so that’s when having the extra storage comes in handy as a buffer.
The problem has been that I haven’t been able to RECOVER from those cloudy days… I’ve been running my battery-to-battery charger on my errands days while I’m driving a lot, but I couldn’t get my charge back up to 80%+ to give me enough margin. I think I got to this new spot with 54%.
So this has become now more a problem of not having enough solar panel wattage to harvest enough energy throughout the day, but I don’t feel like upgrading my solar panels. I WILL say that I’m very grateful that I upgrade my batteries because at this rate if I had been still on my 170ah battery, ONE cloudy day and I would’ve been toast.
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What’s Next?
Praying for sun 😂😂