And yes, I have something like 500 posts to move to the website.
First, it’s increasingly obvious that I don’t need the internet to test ideas any longer, or to make arguments. And instead, I use it to socialize or practice. I have a group of friends who are quite good and will shoot holes in my attempts to create aphoristic narratives. But if you want to argue beyond a certain level it’s just not possible in this format.
So fighting the good fight is fun. And giving people arguments to play with is fun. But I see my ideas all over the right and alt right today, so I’ve had the impact I want to there. And I’m more interested in the less accessible work now.
Secondly, when I finished Grammar and Semantics I was exhausted from the effort. Seriously. When I started in August I knew it would be hard, but I didn’t know how …. involving and exhausting it would be. Or how much it would change my thinking from operationalism as a technique, to all grammars just expansion and contraction of semantic dimensions. And I was having a very hard time working. So I needed a break.
So since the middle of December – thanks partly to two FB Bans in a row due to (((stalkers))) – I’ve been working on our product, and at this point am partway through a total rewrite – from scratch.
When we first started, the tech just wasn’t there – we knew it and took the risk anyway. Last year, I don’t think the tech was quite there and I found React very buggy and leaky.
We worked with a very small team – originally two devs and usually three or four. (The hardest part was communicating the business rules.) So we sprinted for six months, then did a rewrite (refactoring really). A year later we did a rewrite (refactoring). A year later we did a rewrite (refactoring). A year later we got to feature complete, but didn’t get in a rewrite. Last year I started rewriting the backend. Started on the front end, but my health was’t improving. So I spent about eight months just trying to get my health back together.
Today the tech is there – and I’m finally in good health. Really. I feel almost fully recovered. (more sleep, more food, lots more vitamins) and i’ve lost that prematurely aged look that I had last year. I look like myself again even if my asthma continues to … get worse
Anyway, the tech is finally there, and moving quite quickly. But I have to rewrite everything from the bottom up and the only thing I’ve saved so far is some of the domain data from the database. But the difference is great modularity, great performance, and – no memory leaks.
In doing so I’ve made sure it can easily scale and shard across any number of servers. A lot of work to do yet but I’ll keep at it until I get a burning desire to write, and then toggle back and forth until they’re both done. It keeps me from burning out on one thing or the other.
Thankfully my family tolerates my workaholic-ism – although I do do a lot of the cooking.
Oddly, the UK government has apparently tolerated our ‘in development’ status (they have shorter limits than we do in the states), and so has our Bank, so while I still have to move the investors to a US jurisdiction, in the meantime we are still able to operate without urgently bearing the costs of movement. FWIW: The costs of operating an R&D effort outside of the states is just prohibitive. Brits are far more concerned with stopping an unearned penny than creating an earned dollar in innovation. But I still love them. lol
So what does this mean? It means that I’m working on the product and that it’s going pretty well, even if it’s a tremendous amount of work.