Reflection – The Renegade Coder

With summer right around the corner, I thought it would be interesting to sort of map out my business plans while I have a little extra free time. In short, I'm looking to build out a pretty hefty backlog, so I have more freedom to experiment with new forms of content. Building Up a Backlog Coming into this year, I decided to cut back on my article output. I chose to do this because I've been dealing with a lot of challenges in life at the moment. Unfortunately, even with this cut in production, I'm still having trouble keeping up. That said, I'm getting a bit more free time this summer, so I wanted to take advantage of it to build up a backlog of articles. With the addition of this update, I will have articles all the way through June 18 (writing this as of May 5th). Of course, why stop there? My plan for this summer is to build up a large enough backlog that I can actually relax this summer. For me, that would mean writing about a dozen articles to get me to September. If I can get that done in the next week or so, I might even try to push as far as I can until the end of May. Depending on how large the backlog is by the end of May, that will determine what types of projects I can work on going into the rest of the summer. In the next section, we'll take a look at what that could mean. Building Out Other Projects For anyone who has been around for awhile, you probably know that I don't just write articles. Sure, it's my primary function as a creator, but I like to expand into other spaces. One of those spaces is my YouTube channel. Unfortunately, the last video I made didn't have any audio, and I haven't been back to make videos since. In fact, it's probably been over a year at this point. That said, I'm interested in building a video backlog as well once I'm comfortable with my writing backlog. That way, I can release videos slowly over time. You might also be familiar with some of my "experimental" blogs like Trill Trombone which I haven't touched in well over a year. This is a project that actually brings me fairly steady revenue for only having 18 posts, so I'd love to build it out more. That said, this is a bit lower on my priority list. Another project that has fallen a bit by the wayside is my Sample Programs repo on GitHub. This has become a yearly experiment every October, but I want to go in and clean things up sooner rather than later. For now, I'm thinking this will be at the top of my list of priorities. Finally, I'd like to build out my Discord a little more. For awhile there, it was fairly active. Unfortunately, the people who were using it were largely using it to talk to me and not to each other. This made it somewhat time consuming for me, so it's become somewhat inactive. Maybe this summer I can get it going again. Kicking Off New Projects If you read the section above and thought "man, he has a lot on his plate," I'd be right there with you. That said, I always have new ideas that I'd like to give a shot. One of those ideas is to build out some material that I'll be using in the fall for teaching. In particular, I'd like to build out a few articles that cover the topics we would be discussing in class for folks who prefer written content. In that process, I'd like to build out some rubrics and other materials to support my students and graders. Also, I am interested in building out some of the paid content on my top Patreon tier. Right now, I'm building out a Git repo which acts as a companion to the Roll Your Own Python series. There, you'll find all the source code from each article including the solution and the testing code. Likewise, I've included a rubric for folks who want to administer the challenge as a class assignment. For me, this sits a bit higher in priority because it allows me to build out curriculum for future coursework. Beyond that, I really want to focus on existing work. That means writing more articles, creating more videos, and interacting with more folks in the community. If that excites you, I'd recommend checking out this list of ways to help grow the community. Also, if you're interested in other updates related to the site, check out the following posts: The Renegade Coder 2021 Roadmap2020: Year in Review Otherwise, take care!