Hey there Reader,

I hope everyone had a great Turkey Day last week. Ours was small with way too much food and staying up way too late (par for the course), but I had a good time. I decided to skip the newsletter last week, cause I was in a turkey coma along with everyone else, but the last two weeks have a lot of developments to report.

So this week, I have one thing I want to share with ya'll—my new obsession with urbanism YouTube—and then we'll get to a longer Journey Update.

Urbanism YouTube

Okay guys, this stuff is soooo cool. It's been dominating my YouTube feed lately, cause it's so fascinating. Urbanism, in this context, is defined as thinking about urban environments and how we live in them, and there are a ton of really interesting YouTube channels that discuss this topic. Here are some of my favorite channels/videos if you want to check them out:

The Great Places Erased by Suburbia (Third Places):

Suburbs That Don't Suck—Streetcar Suburbs:

Top 10 Underrated American Cities:

This is a bit of a throwback from a past issue, but this is the video that basically kicked off my descent into Urbanism YouTube:

If you guys want more recommendations, let me know with a reply to this email, and I'll hook you up.

Why do I love this side of YouTube? It's shown me that there are many more ways to live than I've been exposed to (I've lived in Phoenix for my entire life), and I would like to experience more of these ways to live in order to find what I love most.

The idea of living in a car-free city where anything I could need/want is a short walk, bike, or metro ride away sounds amazing! Living in a city full of lots of street-side greenery and big parks sounds awesome too!

In fact, when I was in San Diego, one of my reflections from that trip was that I think the fact that I was walking a lot every day (for a couple of days I had 15k+ steps) was contributing to an overall higher quality of life. I believe that walking every day (plus the nice San Diego weather) improved my sleep, my mood, and my productivity. So to that end, I'm trying to seek out more opportunities to spend time in pedestrian-friendly places.

I've got a lot more I could talk about on this topic, but I'll leave it here for this week. Let me know if you want me to go deeper into this though, and I'll see about diving further in a future issue.

Journey Update

Job search

The job search is going very well, and while I haven't landed any offers yet, I'm going into some final-stage interviews tomorrow that I feel very good about. More importantly, though, I just feel like I know exactly what I want and have no reservations about getting another job.

This is not how I was feeling back in the Spring/Summer when I was first searching for jobs. Back then, there was still some trepidation because I was fundamentally unsure of where I wanted to go in the future. I think that probably either came through in my interviews back then or maybe there was a karmic component where God (or The Man Upstairs as I like to call him, or whatever you want to call it) was not letting those doors open due to my internal conflict.

While there are no guarantees, of course, it just feels way better this time around, and I have a renewed faith in myself that I didn't have back then.

Blockchain development

I got some really exciting news a couple of days ago: I got accepted into a sponsored 7-week blockchain development training course called The Interchain Developer Academy. I had to pass an entry programming test to get into the Academy, and while I thought I had not gotten in, apparently I did well enough to get a spot 🤷‍♂️. It started this morning (tomorrow morning when I'm writing this because I'm writing it Wednesday night), and I'm stoked to see where this goes.

I've been interested in crypto development for a minute now, and Cosmos in particular is a project that really interests me. This course will teach me a number of new things, including one or two new programming languages and tons of new computing concepts that make blockchains work. I don't know how I'm going to apply the knowledge in the future yet, I'm just excited to learn for the sake of learning.

I'll keep you guys updated on how it goes.

A new digital organization system

So this one is really cool actually. I had heard of Notion before but never really dove into it until this week. But when I did, I was very pleasantly surprised. I've managed to build out a digital version of my Odaat productivity framework in Notion.

This is really good because I just couldn't keep using the paper version: it's too much friction to create and track tasks in the paper version. And my strategy is basically to continually refine my system over time.

I'm thinking I'll probably find a way to share this system with you guys and the broader public at some point, but more on that later. I need some time to refine the system before sharing it.

As part of this new organization system in Notion, I've also refreshed my editorial board and started to organize my writing better. I want to get back to writing on Medium and even have a few short series that I want to publish (one on crypto and one on developing a SaaS product). I'll be sure to share anything I write with all of you when it comes out of course.