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 October 7th 2020 and the Pandemic is officially turning into the 2nd Wave. It’s been about 198 days since I last updated my Now page, but might as well try for at least twice a year!

The election looms near and a potential doomsday with it, meanwhile people are so used to living in a Covid-19 world that they have normalized it to the point of not really caring or trying to stay that safe or keep others safe. The amount of people vacationing and traveling, especially in Europe, is nuts.

I’m finishing up a small contract for an exciting Covid-19 based event scheduler system called FaceWisely. It’s US only, but their numbers seem to just get worse, so it seems like it’ll be needed and relevant for awhile.

I’m looking for the next thing, whether it be a contract or potentially even an interesting job type thingy.

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. I’ve gotten at least 15 requests since posting this 198 days ago.

Home & Life

I’ve taken the summer to really dig into learning new Serverless technologies and more modern stuff like React, Gatsby, Netlify, FaunaDB, Lambdas for Microservices. I’ve been enjoying it, at least after the fact as React can be like pulling teeth, but I’ve built or are building a number of side projects and even a paid gig with this new stuff.

I’ve got a multiplayer card game in the works, I’ve built a new Covid-19 safe event scheduler for a client, and I’m redoing Stubforge to make it faster, cheaper and easier to use and share tickets with. I’ve been having tons of fun with Repl.it to build quick and easy things from any computer.

I’ve hardly been playing any games lately, still some HoTS, but mostly just ARAM mode, which usually means I’m done with playing the game seriously, at least that was the case with League of Legends when I started playing that mode, but we’ll see. I’ve been too busy looking at real estate in Nova Scotia, spending hours a day on it. I’ve probably looked at 85% of the houses available in the entire province since the start of August.

We are thinking of moving out there and giving up our comfortable life in South Western Ontario, but a new adventure awaits along with either a 100% reduction in mortgage or a huge upgrade in lifestyle and scenery as the disparity of the market makes it really attractive. Having two people working from home definitely opens up options of where you can live and makes you question: why are we living where we are living?

Programming, housing research and Etsy pretty much takes up my free time right now, but that’s ok. It’s starting to get cold which means hottub season has almost begun!

Work & Biz Stuff

Our Etsy shops are doing quite well and picking up steam, so trying to increase that revenue stream has been interesting, but frustrating at the same time, it still seems fairly random, but the arrow does trend upwards.

We are working on a few more shops that are focused more on digital assets and/or fringe items we can make with our laser cutter. If we can shift from having to make stuff physically and ship it to doing only the work up front, that’s really exciting. It would also be nice if I didn’t have to drive to the post office almost every day to drop off a pile of packages and letters.

I’ve built a secret tool to help spy on which products each Etsy shop I watch sells and how much money they roughly make a day. It is both inspiring and jaw dropping to see how some digital shops perform. I may try to turn this into a SaaS offering, or just use internally.

Outside of Etsy stuff and my various projects I’m looking for cool new opportunities, something I can really sink my teeth into.