[Jodavaho.io]

Building things is our higher purpose

Ergo, the most shameful thing is not not finish a creation

I feel deep in my bones that making things is the higher purpose of humanity. It’s our secret weapon against devolving into tribes. The simplest creations improve ones life, and that’s what makes us human: Having agency to improve our lot. The true strength of our gift is making for others. Making something desireable from something less desireable underpins every part of cities, is the foundation of medicine, and a basic requirement of our economy. It will make us an interstellar species, because we can make it so if we want. We can make anything so, if we really want it. The wanting is the hardest part.

Everything made is in service of this divine. So, I’ve realized that the most shameful thing I do is not finish. I haven’t created until it’s made available for myself or others.

I’ve made a life decision: No more projects until my current top 3 are done. When one is done, I sub it out and can sub one in. My current top 3 are:

• Highfleet Ship Optimizer: Which has taken so long I doubt anyone will be playing the game by the time I finish it. Should be done soon. Using SCIP, Python on AWS Lambda, and a frontend hosted for free on Vercel. Nice and cheap at a bout a buck a month.

• Personal finance automation. Not quite automated trading, but at least real-time monitoring and some basic savings deposits. Gonna be a CLI integration with Plaid to fetch balances. Might be a nice open-source project. I’d love a nice 80s terminal aesthetic to it for funzies.

• Gunplay-heavy, cyberpunk-like tabletop rpg system, to include better statistics from rolling, a more systematic skill tree, increased lethality over typical games, and better system for tracking influence, connections, and wealth. A friend and I are play-testing it.

The backlog is long, but I’ll feel better if I can finish a few here and there rather than letting them all wait around and catching the latest idea.

Note: I copied this from a letter I wrote to a friend. I hope he won’t mind.