Communication Day
2026-02-09
I woke up at 6am, went to the gym for the first time in a couple months, then started work around 8am. The first weekend of the Sailbrush fundraiser has been a massive success so far, and I’m feeling enormously grateful that so many people believe in me.
A big part of this project is going to be communicating what I’m doing, because now that I’ve taken people’s money, they deserve to know what I’m up to. This will require some adjustment because I’m used to working away in silence. So, today is mostly about communication. I’ve been answering emails, I’m setting up this very bare-bones blog so I have a place (not controlled by a social media company) for frequent updates that don’t require a massive time investment, and I’m working on a video to set expectations about what kind of communication people can expect from me. I’d like to produce at least a video per month about the development process, but a good video could take a week or more to produce, and every minute I spend editing is a minute I can’t code, so we’ll see what I’m able to do. Most posts probably won’t be this long, but I’ll try to post something every weekday.
Between January 8th and February 2nd I was coding at least 12, sometimes as much as 16, hours per day, including weekends. I noticed that when I started to get tired at the end of the day, I would feel some anger that my body required sleep. I just want to keep coding!
The most successful people I know would be doing what they do even if they weren’t getting paid. In fact, you couldn’t pay them to stop. From the outside it looks like they’re working insanely hard, but I think the truth is that they’re just passionate about what they’re doing, and it doesn’t feel like work to them. Programming has always been that way for me. I think it may actually be physically impossible for me to get bored of it, and if I didn’t need to eat and sleep to survive, I would spend all my time coding. I don’t think I’m a particularly hard worker, I’m just very lucky that I happen to love something this much. Working 12+ hour days probably isn’t sustainable long-term though, so as of today I’ll be investing the minimum amount of time needed to properly take care of my body. After almost a month of eating an average of one meal per day, I’ve started to lose weight, so I gotta slow down a bit.
This work is deeply meaningful to me. It’s immoral that proprietary software companies are essentially holding people’s work hostage. If you stop paying their subscription fees, you can’t access your art, and that’s wrong. There are many things wrong with this world, but this is one thing I can help fix.