What I'm Building Next

I’m a builder. It’s who I am at heart.

For the last few years, I’ve spent perhaps too many hours building creative side projects.

My first memory of building something stems from my junior year of high school. That was eight years ago. Damn, I feel old now. I participated in the Brookhaven National Laboratory Bridge Building contest through my AP Physics class. The goal was to design a bridge that could withstand more force than all others.

Most people followed a similar pattern, as it was known to be a strong foundation. But not me. I wanted to be different and unlike everyone else. So, I built a cool, double-arch design that looked something like this:

Excuse this abomination of a sketch. I would have shared an image of my bridge, but I don’t have any. So, you’re stuck looking at this instead.

Anyway, creating a unique design like this made me win the aesthetic award for best-looking bridge. I’m not sure if this project jump-started my passion for building things, but it’s the earliest memory I have of enjoying building, so for now, I’ll pretend this incited my passion.

I continued to build side projects throughout college.

I learned how to use WordPress and built a few websites. I never published any of them because they sucked. But they created momentum and led me to my first big build—my novel.

During my second year of college, I wrote and self-published a Sci-Fi novel called The Doors of Life. Was the book great? No. There were many plot holes and grammatical errors. Did the book bless me with a boatload of money and fame? Unfortunately, that’s a no, too. Despite its lack of success, crafting the book was my highlight of college. I endured a nine-month period full of writing, editing, more editing, and scattering index cards of plot points on my bedroom floor. My roommates thought I was crazy for that last one.

After college, I once again continued to build.

In the 1-2 years after graduating, I basically lived on Twitter, attempting to build a social media following and authority in the marketing space. To complement that, I created two newsletters to boost my writing skills and attract people to my ideas. The first newsletter focused on sharing personal stories, which I used to hone my storytelling skills. My second newsletter centered around explaining marketing concepts through movie analogies.

My Twitter brand and newsletters failed tremendously, however. I couldn’t scale either into a large or profitable following. But that didn’t upset me. I enjoyed the building process and knew I would build something better in the future.

In my 2-3 years post-graduation, I built stuff with more success.

Data analytics intrigued me at this time, and I spent a lot of time building cool projects using SQL and Python. I worked part-time during this period, so I had plenty of time to build. After a few months, I saw success and landed a data analyst job.

I also published more writing online. I built a blog called Dorky Data (RIP), where I frequently shared what I learned about data analytics and experienced during my data job hunt. In addition, I posted almost daily on LinkedIn.

These writing ventures succeeded as well. Dorky Data hit a few hundred monthly visitors by the end of 2023, and my LinkedIn had great engagement and 8K+ followers. Not too shabby. Neither were out-of-this-world successes, but they were good relative to my previous projects.

Now, we hit the 3-4 year post-graduation mark. For this period of time, I didn’t build much. I created this site and posted semi-consistently, but I never marketed the site, so no one read my work. Aside from this, I didn’t build anything else. There were no side projects to excite me.

Programming and tech started to interest me, but I spent all of my time researching theory and never applied skills to build something real. That was my mistake. I had the potential to work on cool side projects, but nothing good arose.

That’s why I’m writing this post now.

I feel motivated again to begin building something new; however, I struggled to conceptualize something. Since programming still interests me, I want to build something with code. Through work and research, I understand the fundamentals of software engineering and have some decent Python skills. Aside from that, my technical knowledge is high-level.

So, I have the freedom to pick any language to develop, but there are so many to choose.

My initial list of programming skills to build with includes Python, C++, and Java. Those are useful languages to know, and I wasted a lot of time contemplating which to pursue. That was a mistake. I realized I can’t select my next project based on a programming language. Instead, I must select it based on the tool/application I want to build.

I spent a few more days pondering over what I could build with code and came up with far too many vague answers.

But today I had an epiphany.

I realized the best thing to build is this website. My personal site is very simple, and I only host my writing here. Around this time last year, I wrote about how I want my website to be my personal Binge Bank. I want it to be a place people come to and learn about who I am, what I value, and what I’m interested in.

Blog posts are one of the best ways to create a strong Binge Bank, but not the only way. I realize there are cool things I’m doing in my free time that provide more insight into what I value and what I’m interested in at a given point in time.

So, I have two ideas to start with.

The first concerns my music consumption. I’m one of those people who listens to music frequently throughout the day. Whether I’m working, writing, doing chores, working out, or eating, music’s likely playing in the background. One of the few times I don’t listen to music is when I’m walking the lovely NYC streets.

I’ve noticed that my taste in music often changes. It shifts between Latin, Pop, Country, and more. I think it would be cool to visualize how my daily taste in music trends over time, and fortunately, Spotify has an easy-to-use API for me to collect my recently played tracks.

Since I have a strong foundation with Python, I can build a data pipeline to pull data from the API and load it into this site.

My second idea concerns the content I consume on a day-to-day basis. I always read blog posts, watch YouTube videos, and listen to podcasts. Whenever I find a cool piece, I save its link in Notion. But I do so in a messy, unorganized fashion.

So, my thought process here is that I can use the Notion API to extract content links and post them to this site. This would be useful because it gives wonderful people like you insights into the people and ideas I’m thinking about.

What does all of this mean? Well, I’m going all-in on enhancing this website and putting more of myself online.

I finally have an exciting side project to build and look forward to. I’ll share more here over time, but it appears some cool things are coming from me soon.