sacha chua :: living an awesome life

“Fourteen?!” my husband exclaimed. I looked up. He was talking to J-, who had apparently called from school asking if she could bring her friends over for pie. Fourteen teenagers in total. Two pies. After some hemming and hawing, he agreed, figuring that it was better to have them over than for them to have pie on some street corner.

We scrambled to get things ready. This meant ditching the comfortable bathrobes and breaking out the stack of saucers that I’d accumulated for my tea parties. As the kids tromped closer, W- directed them to the backyard. Although it was cold and the deck was wet, it wasn’t chilly, and there simply was not enough space in the living room to accommodate fourteen sugar-high bundles of energy. So the deck it would have to be.

W- brought the portable workbench out. We put the saucers and forks on the workbench, entrusted the pie server to J-, and stood back as the kids divided the apple pie and the pumpkin pie among themselves. They were apparently celebrating a fundraising milestone: their club had raised $100 for Free the Children. They had been planning the pie party for a month, but had forgotten to figure out where this pie party was going to take place. Fortunately, W- and I were at home and could give permission.

After the pie, the kids brought out their packed lunches. They shared their snacks with each other. Chocolate was the object of much envy, seaweed the currency of cool. They congratulated themselves on their fundraising, and circled around to repeat their oath. (It started with “I like kitties, and turtles too.”) They planned more celebrations for their next fundraising milestones.

It was much less chaotic than one might have expected. The kids tidied up before heading back to school, giving us the saucers and forks with thanks and apologies, and putting other garbage into a large bowl. It was fun hosting everyone, even.

Things that worked well:

• Having lots of saucers and forks, thanks to my tea parties
• Being around in the day for J- and her friends

Things that would make this even better:

• More notice!
• A group shot?

The more people I talk to about my plans for leaving IBM and experimenting with business, the more real the idea becomes. The more excited and confident I get about it, too, which is a good sign.

Today I sent my formal resignation e-mail, the one that kicks off all the associated HR processes. I named February 17 as my date: four years, four months, and two days after I joined IBM.

I expect to feel more nostalgia as the date approaches, and perhaps uncertainty. That’s all normal, which is why I’m brainstorming and writing down my reasons. The notes will come in handy if I hit a slump. It looks like all systems are go, though. It’s clearly a good idea for me at this point in time.

I’ve found people to take over all of my extracurricular interests. I’ve been braindumping enough throughout my time at IBM to not worry as much about transitions. I’ve always worked on things with the lottery/bus factor in mind: would the project be endangered if I won the lottery or got hit by a bus? (The lottery is highly unlikely, since I don’t buy tickets; I usually look both ways when crossing the street, but one never knows what could happen in the streets of Toronto.) I’ve written lots of notes and shared as much as I could as publicly as I could, and now it’s easy to link things together in a knowledge map on a wiki page that people can even update after I’m gone.

My manager told me of ways back in, and contracting companies that IBM is used to working with. It might be an option. I’d like to spend some time up front seeing if I can develop a business. Freelancing sounds like a reliable alternative, but it’s similar enough to what I currently do at IBM that I think I would learn lots more from trying to build a proper sustainable business with compounding value.

One step at a time. The project that I’m working on looks decent in IE8, IE9, Firefox, and Safari, and it looks a heck of a lot better than it did when I took it over. I’m on track to wrap that up well. Then there’s some HR paperwork to take care of, and more braindumping of memories and thoughts before they fade into fuzziness. Then the transition! Then slowly easing into experiments and feedback cycles and little bets…

It’s been four years of awesomeness at IBM. I’ve:

• helped companies and communities collaborate
• facilitated brainstorming workshops with executives from leading companies
• built web apps in Drupal and Ruby on Rails
• created popular tools for community newsletters and analyses
• drawn comics that made people smile across IBM, and
• learned from and shared with people around the world.

It totally rocked. Thank you!

Mid-February 2012, I’ll be on to my next experiment. I want to help people save time and make better decisions. Let’s see how we can make that a sustainable business!

I’m looking forward to learning more about business, and sharing the adventure with you. =)

Stay in touch!

• Blog: http://livinganawesomelife.com
• Twitter: @sachac
• E-mail: sacha@sachachua.com

Stay tuned!

So I’ve taken to calling my personal dashboard Quantified Awesome, and I even have the domain name for it. The name is fun, and it reminds me that this is data tracking for a reason: to live an even more awesome life. Right now, I use it for time, clothes, library books, fruits and vegetables, stuff, and measurements. I’ll add more as ideas come to me, and as I use the tools, I’ll flesh out the interface.

Quantified Self Toronto meetups have been fantastic for getting more ideas and for sharing what I’m working on with other people. I think this kind of tracking would be the kind of geeky thing that might be interesting for the DemoCamp Toronto crowd, too.

DemoCamp demos tend to be mostly startups, and I’m not at the point of turning this into a business yet. I remember they had lots of fun with my Livin’ la Vida Emacs talk, though, and I’d like to inspire people to apply their skills – programming, designing, whatever – to their own lives. I’d also love to connect with other people so that I can be inspired by their examples. People who are into this sort of thing in Toronto are probably already part of Quantified Self Toronto, though, so there may not be that much extra value in presenting something mainly for connection purposes. If I’m going to focus on either inspiring or collecting feedback, then, I want to make sure that people’s activation costs are low.

So, what would it take to get this to the point where I can create a lot of value in 10 minutes of demo and five minutes of Q&A? (Or if this is anything like my other talk, a short demo derailed by people anticipating jokes, turned into a general truth-is-funnier-than-fiction thing. =) )

I’d probably want to have lots of data driving lots of visualizations, because they’re easier to see on a big projected screen. If I build this up over a few months, I’ll have the data to let me ask interesting questions and report on behavioural changes, which will be really useful. I may want to shift from using RaphaelJS to using Protovis or a similar library for visualizations so that I can take advantage of the source code examples for a wide range of charts.

Another key thing would be to either allow other users or share the source code (maybe both! less hassle for helping people get started). That way, it’s not just about “Hey, this is cool! But you can’t use it unless you build your own.”

Opening this up to people will probably mean splitting my project time into development and support. It’s a trade-off: would the increased feedback be worth the support load? Depending on people and expectations (here there be bugs!), it might be okay. It might be a good idea to slow down and apply the same discipline we’re adopting on our work projects, too: test, test, test. I think it might be worth gradually opening this up over the next few months, with an eye towards demonstrating it at DemoCamp when I think it’ll help lots of people get started. It’s also highly likely that there’ll be a second Quantified Self conference, so that might be something good to plan for as well.

There are plenty of companies focused on making money by helping people track their life (health, mostly). Me, I want to be able to ask questions about life and figure out how to answer them, I want to inspire other people to try doing that too, and I eventually want to help build tools to make it easier for people to do so. Besides, it’s a great way to practice my development skills without giving in to the temptation to spend all that time on work instead. =)

Most of this weekend was taken up by schoolwork. J- had a large Math project to work on – cereal box design (volume, surface area, ratios, etc.) and a writing assignment. She also needed to work on her application for the CyberArts high school program.

I don’t know how other families handle it. W- has been tutoring J- through the tough parts, and that takes time.

As for me, I followed up on the events I attended last week. I’ve also been working on Project C. Spotted a few things I missed last runthrough. Sometimes it feels like three steps forward, one step back. But that’s okay.

Also, I made spaghetti and meatballs for the first time!

(Helped J- learn Inkscape, too. Yay!)

Big week! Several intense days and late nights, but still lots of progress.