Journaling
9:10am.
Morning!! Today is a cloudy and rainy day in Chicago. I love it, and how the temperature outside feels this morning. It is good for the trees and it helps bring even more verdant vibes to the city.
This is the week I am going to put my effective leadership skills into practice.
Today is the start of something special.
At least that’s what I like to tell myself sometimes 😂
I have a dentist’s appointment in a little bit. Right now, my coffee is brewing. I’ve been up for a while since I slept over at Rosie’s house last night. It was a great time being with family and bonding with some of my older relatives. I slept nicely in a guest bedroom in the cold, cozy basement on a firm full size mattress and the bedroom with carpet. I fell asleep to a meditation on Calm, and listening to the soft, gentle raindrops from the app.
Planning
Today’s major plan is:
- social media. consistency is what matters. consistency is key. choose your habits in such a way that you show consistency towards your values, your goals, your aspirations and the lifestyle you want to create.
- dentist’s appointment
- solopreneur mastermind planning
- alacran studio team meeting planning
- the thought experiment blog
Noodling
“Just another place to go.”
That’s the thought that popped up to me when I took a physical break from typing. I ended up going onto Twitter, tweeting that first bullet point, changed my Twitter profile picture, and clicked on the link in my bio. I had forgotten what the link on my Twitter profile was. Lol haha oopsie
I realized it was a link to my personal website. This was a site I had created when I was in a very interesting point in my life, midst the COVID-19 pandemic, working from home, and trying to use coding for something I was passionate about.
The Technical Stuff
Headless CMS and the Jamstack
During 2020 & 2021, I started to learn about how I could use Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) to host apps using the Jamstack approach to web development. This article does a great job of explaining what it is more in-depth!
Basically put, these are websites that are fully functional with just a single piece of a functional running app. You develop a single “package” using different commands to the computer, and with a couple clicks, you can deploy that app to a custom domain you own. I purchase my domains on Google Domains, and I highly recommend it.
These applications that are built can be built on top of various Javascript frameworks and libraries, such as Angular or React, to put real custom websites out into the real world.
No need for expensive website builder subscriptions.
Just purchase a custom domain and bam! You've got a website.
Providers
Some of the tools that offer this are Netlify, Digital Ocean, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform.
From my experience and research, it was fairly trivial to get a Gatsby web application started, running, and making new blog posts. Gatsby is a tool built on top of the React framework that allows development teams to deliver Jamstack sites quickly and seamlessly.
I'm hosting it on Netlify, and started with just a few clicks of a button. I've been pretty happy with the ease, results, and reliability.
From there, it's a question of what different tools and capabilities I can build in, and how this make sense as digital real estate for people to learn about things, or get things done. I set off on this journey because I believed that many of the features small to medium-sized businesses need can be custom-built in this day and age that translates to automation, efficiency, and creativity.
Automation
Automation is possible because once a visitor submits a form, we receive an email that kicks off an entire process of:
- getting in touch with the visitor
- offer services that present value
- provide information that is beneficial to them
Efficiency Via Webhooks
Webhooks are small functions that run on a cloud computing provider and can be initiated with an event (such as a new form entry being submitted), access information (such as a name or email address), and perform some action (send an email with a link to a calendar app or links to additional information).
With webhooks, creating a sequence of processes on a computer can be a huge time saver. Instead of manually typing out certain tasks, you can write some script to take care of that. Basically moving information around-- this translates to efficiency. Creating a library of automations, or even having access to them, can be a huge tool in running any business.
Improved Development Experience
As we build our solutions custom and have full control of the websites, we can build them effectively using great tools such as Webflow and Figma to create beautiful, consistent, and effective websites that work. Having creative freedom in the development process encourages teams to do good work and improves the developer experience.
Challenges
One thing that is currently holding me up in my process is that I do not make a habit of opening the development environment for the site and struggle to add new content.
But that changes today!!
Affirmations
I will create easy, effective processes that reduce barriers to communicate. I will execute with consistency each and every day working towards my goals.
I am healthy, wealthy, and handsome. I am creative, an effective leader, and fun. I am a Latino entrepreneur, and I take up space in the world. I show up for myself and for others, and I’m approaching work with as much intention as I can. Thanks for showing up with me today. Appreciate you, hope you have a good one.
Follow Up
5:31pm.
Instead of typing this into some page on Notion, I'm actually typing this using Markdown syntax inside monday-august-8th-2022.md. If you follow me on Twitter, you'd have seen my tweets about working on this today lol and my dentist's appointment 😂😂.
I cut the middleman out of my process of sharing my thoughts by typing straight into a platform where I can just save and upload, and it is deployed out there on the interwebz 🤙🏼
I'm happy with today's progress. Made some great progress on my basic-blog project (which you can see here). I think next would be to add some pictures throughout the blog post, add an option to sign up for a Buttondown newsletter, and have links to all my projects I've got going in the moment.
If you're reading this today, congrats! You're an early adopter. I look forward to continued success together.
Take care of yourself.
Cheers ✨🥂🍾
-JV 8/8/22