What is a Now page?
Think of what you’d tell a friend you hadn’t seen in a year.
You can learn more about Now pages here.
What is Ivan up to now?
Hey it’s me, Ivan, the guy who you are reading about right now. Today it’s April 23rd 2021 and the vaccine roll out is very slow here. My parents got it, and a few people my age got it somehow, so I assume they must have health conditions.
Disclaimer
If you are researching for your VC fund and think I still actively run Will Pwn 4 Food, may god have mercy on your fund. Despite this warning, the requests just keep coming in! Spam is still alive and well in the world.
Home & Life
The real estate market is still crazy, we spent 8 months seriously looking at moving, but when it came down to it we decided it was best to just stay for now, especially since we can’t visit any of the places we’d like to move to. When driving the comfortable and familiar streets of KW and seeing all the familiar faces at every store, it’s hard to want to leave that behind and start something new from scratch just to save a few bucks on mortgage. If you leave, there is no coming back, you are priced out instantly, so no escape hatch. Renting is too scary a proposition right now as it’s too easy to get screwed.
Gaming has been pretty boring, although I did mostly enjoy Cyberpunk. I’m playing it again for some unknown reason, but it’s not really providing what I want, even on the hardest difficulty. Too easy.
We’ve started renovations and are nearly done week 3. It’s hard to get work done with all the distraction and project management of it. Having gone into lockdown the day before it starts also makes it so much harder to get what is needed or to pick out things. A lot of sites are really garbage and I hope they are feeling that way too. I don’t care what brands you sell, I want you to show me all the products you sell in a nice interface, with prices.
You can really feel the difference between the Home Depot and Lowes websites in terms of filters on product categories and the quantity of reviews and info.
Amazon is feeling more garbage every day. Nothing you get is reliable, it’s almost guaranteed to be worse than Walmart quality, or a scam, or broken. What was once awesome is now gamed crap. I just bought 2 different branded small appliances and both were the English/Spanish instead of English/French, which feels wrong. Warranty? Yeah right! Bought something with next day, then next day get a warning that it’ll ship in some unknown future time, which negates the only reason we bought it, and it was time sensitive. Just another day on Amazon.
There is not enough time in the day for everything we want to do and now need to do with renos. The pandemic hasn’t generated any boredom for us, time has truly flown by.
Work & Biz Stuff
I’m pretty busy working on a new project with a mentor that’s helped take my NextJs knowledge to the next level and once I again I hit that frustrating point of pushing the boundaries of what the system can and is supposed to do, versus what everyone wishes it would do.
I feel like I’m trying to transition all my future stuff to JS/Static/Microservices even though some things are far more painful, but it’s potentially so fast, flexible, cheap and performant. It’s also good for keeping my skill set up to date for any future work that may come in. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em type of thing.
Using TailwindCSS on all my new stuff, which is mostly good, or at least feels like I have a bit more control, over say using Bootstrap in React, which has it’s own components that can be hard to work with as they are abstracted. There are definitely still things that aren’t great, but the speed is there and lots of examples online to copy for different elements.
I’m rebuilding out an entirely new version of Stubforge to launch within the next 30 days, which will be far faster and more responsive than the original. It will also allow for the anonymous creation of tickets that can also be copied and edited. Anyone will be able to buy any ticket easily through Shopify. I’m hoping this will help spread the word of the site and make it much easier to go viral. I have a friend who aims to partner and market the site and specific tickets, so I’m excited to see how that goes.
January spoiled us for Etsy sales as we though it would be dead (but no it was not!!), and then the subsequent months met our original expectations. It’s still pretty slow, but we’ve been working on adding lots of new tickets to the Stubforge Etsy store, some of which can generate large orders (like 100+ tickets at a time). As Covid starts to get under control, especially in the US, we think these tickets will get popular as they are all about life event gatherings.
Our digital shop has been selling a small handful of things daily, which is nice, but not enough to do much with yet. We’ve found a few winners that sell daily and need to focus more time on generating more content, it’s just been hard with everything going on. It’s a numbers game, which means lots of time investment.