Personal Projects I’m Enjoying

Despite living in an unpredictable world filled with death during the COVID pandemic, I’ve been finding a lot of joy lately in my personal projects.

On the public facing side of things, I have:

• Led a team of volunteer software engineers to help Clinica Colorado launch CovidLine, a Twilio-based IVR and call routing solution that provides multi-lingual symptom screening and free telehealth doctor visits for the uninsured and undocumented in Colorado.
• Started a public equity investing newsletter where I publicly share my decision-making process, which includes a mission to evaluate every company underlying the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund (VTSAX) one company at a time.
• Started a free online cooking class newsletter focused on making the foods I’m passionate about accessible to anyone who wants to try.

On the home front, my inner life development continues and if you follow me on social media you might be getting glimpses of some of these projects:

• Self-reliance, prepping, and cultivating some homesteading skills including growing some of my own pizza toppings. (I was even quoted at the end of this long-form piece on “Silicon Valley Preppers” in the New York Times featuring my friends at ThePrepared.com)
• Journaling and reading extensively around grief. As I processed the end of Mattermark over the past couple year, I’ve realized that loss brought up a lot of old wounds that didn’t receive the attention and tenderness they needed to heal. I’m working to give that to myself now, accept my anger at the sense of abandonment I felt at the time, and reframe those stories as the broader tragedies they were (a teen suicide, a friend’s drug overdose and subsequent months in a coma) without centering on myself and my pain.
• Upping my impeccability level when it comes to all manner of cyclical and entropic life processes like chores, household management, personal finance, self care, hygiene and exercise. They all involve compounding and require long-term thinking, and I have room for improvement in connecting my day-to-day actions with my longer term vision for my life.
• Staying in touch with friends through texts, calls, Zoom double dates and other channels, but also working harder to notice the truth of how close we really are (or aren’t), accepting that, and modifying my expectations and engagement model accordingly. I have found a mobile app called Fabriq extremely helpful for this.
• Continuing to read extensively, though I am significantly behind track for my goal of finishing 200 books this year with 30 completed so far.

And of course, my journey as a home chef continues…

For more food pics, make sure to follow me on Instagram!