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Celebrating Mother’s Day with the family. May, 2024.

Big picture

I’m still living in Cape Town. My kids are 3 (Victor) and 5 (Lockwood).

I’m working for myself full time—mostly on my Django SaaS boilerplate, SaaS Pegasus, and related projects. It’s going well!

Smaller picture

Here’s a more zoomed-in picture of my life in the last couple months.

Getting ready for travel

We are going to North America for all of July. Will be touring around New England and Toronto visiting with friends and family. The family is excited!

We bought a house

In other personal news, we bought a house! It’s not far from our current place in Vredehoek, Cape Town. This is our first home purchase and we have previously only rented furnished places, so we have a lot to figure out (and buy) in the next few months.

Move-in is slotted for September 1.

Adding a store to SaaS Pegasus

My biggest project in the past few months has been adding a codebase store to Pegasus. And it’s live! You can only access it via a secret link, but I’ve announced it on the Pegasus Slack and even made a handful of sales already.

The official launch will be sometime in June because I am not willing to wait till after our travel.

Working on a talk

I’m going to be speaking at a Django Boston meetup while I’m in town—so I’m working on my talk.

The working title is “How to build one-person businesses with Django”.

I will probably not update this for July while we’re traveling.

Previously

These are updates from May:

Learning Astro, and using it to launch a new website

I recently built a new website with Astro. The website is a directory of SaaS boilerplates. I’m pretty happy with how it came out!

Astro is the latest static site builder I’ve tried (previously: Jekyll, Hugo, Next.js). And—after spending a week with it—I really loved it. I’m now tempted to port some of my other sites—especially this one—to Astro.

Figuring out my YouTube channel

I have a programming YouTube channel, which serves as a form of marketing and documentation for Pegasus. Right now the content is mostly unfiltered live streams of me building something with Django and Pegasus.

I have the sense that I could make my content a lot better, but that it would also take a lot more effort per video—and I’ve been debating whether this is a good idea.

My short term idea is to produce one higher-quality video and see how different the performance is, and then use that to determine next steps.

Pondering the future of this website (and writing, for me)

In a similar vein, I’m not sure what I’m doing with this website anymore.

Last year I thought I should try to produce more ambitious writing, but that mostly failed. This year my writing has mostly taken a back-burner to coding, working on products, and YouTube. I have been publishing occasional retrospectives, but I haven’t been sending them out to my newsletter, because I think they are kind of uninteresting.

I’m not currently putting a lot of energy into writing, but it remains an unresolved topic that occupies space in my mind.

Getting into Tears of the Kingdom

We recently got Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom for the Switch. Since then, most evenings, I play for an hour-ish while Lockwood (5) and Victor (3) give me directions. We are just starting to explore the world, and hopefully it will hold our attention for some time. Currently, this is often the best part of all three of our days.