This Week:
- The final outcome of my motorcycle license side quest.
- Camping in the mountains of Colorado at peak fall colors.
- Why my mindset is different now.
September 2024
| Su | M | T | W | Th | F | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 9/1 | 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 | 10/1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
Where In The World Was I?
- Gillette, Wyoming
- Spearfish, South Dakota
- Belle Fourche, South Dakota
- Denver, Colorado
- 🌲 Colorado Mountains
Metrics From The Week
I’m still in that “good enough” territory, but now that I’m back settled in I’m starting to dial back in my routine. Hopefully should see some improvements over the next week.
It’s definitely hard up here at 9,500ft of elevation, but I’m trying to get back into full swing of running and working out. So far so good, but the HRV is definitely taking a hit 😅
That spike Tuesday was when I made the 6.5 hour drive from South Dakota back to Denver while I crushed some podcasts.
Business Progress Update
Still plowing full steam ahead here. Now that I’m back settled in I’ve gotten some good focused work done.
Last week I had done a UI update to the Video Explorer page and added a basic similar videos algorithm.
This week had 2 major updates.
Server Side Pagination
One of the big bottlenecks I’ve been dealing with is how many videos I can show to the user. Up until now I’ve been doing everything client-side: give all the results I have to the user’s browser, then have filtering, sorting, searching done in the browser.
I was responding with about 1,800 videos, but I’ve been sitting on about 40,000+ outlier videos that I’ve gathered and the user has no way to access those.
So, I decided to move the results to server-side pagination. This way, the user would request videos (search query, filters, sorting, etc.), all the videos would be gathered on the server, then a page of 20 would be returned. They could request another 20 by clicking “Show More.”
Sounds easy, right?
Heh…
This was a big refactor and another indicator of the increasing complexity that I’m entering. But again, changes like these are (in my opinion) incredibly valuable.
There’s not much visually to show for the change, but I got it done. Now the user is able to effectively query 25,000 videos, up from 1,800.
One of the new downsides and limitations here is speed. Because now the server is parsing through tens of thousands of videos, it takes a bit longer for user interactions. Not unbearable yet, but I’ll definitely have to come back and speed things up.
Title Formats
This was a user-requested feature, to have the outlier videos be converted in title formats automatically. Finding formats was another piece of advice I had heard multiple times, so I knew this would potentially be a valuable one.
A title format generally looks like this:
- Original video title: “The New Way to Get Views in 2024”
- Title format: “The New Way to [desired outcome] in [timeframe]”
The idea is that you can now apply the title format to whatever niche or topic you want.
- “The New Way to Build Muscle in 24 hours”
So this week I dove in, created an algorithm to generate formats, added a display option to the Video Explorer page to see title formats, and created a whole new Format Explorer page.
Though the algorithm still has some room to improve, it’s “good enough” (there’s that phrase again), and the rest of the UI is pretty much done I just have a couple small tweaks to make then deploy the changes and scale up generating the title formats.
The Rest
I added a similar videos section to the details card of each new video idea.
And now that I have title formats, I updated my similar videos algorithm that I started last week and it’s WAY better.
As I’ve started to mention more, everything is getting more complicated as I scale up the number of videos I’m handling from a few thousand to tens of thousands. But, that’s just the nature of how things go here…
Little updates like using the formats in the similar videos and seeing how much better the results are give me those wide-eyed dopamine spikes of motivation to keep pushing.
Closing Out The Side Quest
Last Sunday I had just passed my second motorcycle course, and the right one this time…
So I bopped over to Spearfish, South Dakota (last time I was here: The Week That Took Me To South Dakota: Forest Camping, Mud, And Spontaneous Adventures, July 9, 2023).
That little thing sticking up in the second photo is Devil’s Tower Monument! I visited it last year (A Wild Week On The Road: From South Dakota’s Hidden Gems To Life On A Kansas Farm, July 16, 2023).
Stayed in a campground to get my one-night stay receipt (for new/renewing license as a full-time traveler)
(side note: my 2nd-ever paid campground staying in my van. The 1st was literally the same campground last year 😄)
Took the next day to get some work done as I decided which DMV to go to (they opened the following day). I had 2 clear options and I spent a while trying to figure out which one to take (talked about this in What’s helping me through this major decision fatigue). The dilemma came from questioning if I should hang around in the Black Hills since I drove all the way up there, versus prioritize getting to the next destination.
I ended up choosing the more aggressive option (the latter) and drove up to Belle Fourche the next day. I filled out the renewing license application, gave her my MSF course completion card, one-night stay receipt, mailbox agreement, took a new license photo and BANG I had a new license WITH “Class 2: Car/Light Truck/Motorcycle” on the back.
Heck yeah. Mission accomplished.
The Open Road
I got my new license and immediately hit the open road, driving ~6.5 hours straight back to Denver.
I stocked up the van, got some errands and work done for a day and a half…
Then started driving up into the mountains.
And took a little rolling stop through Leadville, Colorado, my first time here!
I’ll be honest, for a Thursday afternoon at 1pm there was more traffic on I70 than I was expecting. Nothing like some 100% focused white knuckling through Colorado on I70 😅 Every time I tried putting on a podcast to listen to, I’d shut if off 2 minutes later because it was literally distracting my brain from the focus I needed. Quite a change from the empty straight roads through Wyoming 😄
The Final Destination
I found a spot up in the mountains and honestly I’m still blown away… The fall colors of the aspens up here are literally peak colors. I couldn’t have timed it any better.
I found a spot with some good cell signal, totally unobstructed from trees (for maximum solar and Starlink), in this gorgeous area.
This, this moment, is what I have been looking forward to for weeks, maybe months: camped in the mountain west, perfect temperature, tons of sun, working on my laptop off of Starlink.
And it’s better than I could’ve even imagined. The ultimate freedom camping in the mountains of Colorado
Up until this point I had been focused on getting things done and set up administrative-wise. But now I can finally focus on just living, working, and enjoying this experience.
Life is finally back to the now. Back to locking in, getting intentional about my routine, working out, learning, and growing.
Does that mean I’m done driving around? No, I’ll continue to move around, but now with the focus of living and working and NOT trying to get somewhere. I do have some rough plans for the next couple weeks/months, but it’s all within that focus.
This feels even more grand than I can express in words because I think it’s the first time (in a while) I’ve been in this state of mind. My first year in the van I spent road tripping the western U.S. (which you can find my weekly blog posts on my website), constantly moving. That winter I slowed down more, skiing and spending lot of time working from coffee shops, but then as spring came around the next thing was to pack up all my stuff, sell my 4Runner, drive across the country, and fly abroad.
So in some ways it feels like I’m experiencing van life for the first time right now and that’s special.
Anyways, I’m extremely grateful to be here and to experience this. This life is wild.
What’s Next?
Working on dialing in the routine, getting back to living with growth and intention, and enjoying life.