People overestimate what can be done in one year and underestimate what can be done in ten.

• Someone, probably

The quote above gets thrown around a lot in my circles, but I think it is useful in several ways. Most people are too concerned with short term value, too ambitious with their short term goals, and unwilling to stick at something for very long. This bias leads companies to focus too heavily on monthly or quarterly (or weekly!) goals, and individuals to avoid taking on ambitious projects. The end of 2019 saw a lot of people posting 10 year retrospectives and reading these is a great way to put into perspective what can be achieved in 10 years.

This is all a preface to me admitting that I didn’t achieve as much in 2019 as I would have liked to, but taking comfort in the fact that my goals for 2020 are similar to what they were a year ago, and some progress has been made, so I’m looking forward to the next 12 months. One bite at a time.

The main themes of 2019 that I’m covering in this post are:

Side projects, passive income, and Ritza

I write and do other things by moonlight for money, mainly because I enjoy it, but also because it pays enough to keep me in software engineering.

Moving to Europe and applying for many visas, getting some rejections

Moving is difficult and governments will keep asking for more paperwork until the Amazon forests runs out. Read about this section if you’re interested in leaving South Africa without a second passport.

Reading about finance, economics, politics, and startups

I read less than I wanted to this year, but one or two highlights stuck out.

Side projects, passive income, and education

In 2018, I focussed on writing technical tutorials by moonlight. I enjoy writing these as I get paid but the content I produce is made available for free, which seems like a win-win. Last year, I continued writing for various clients under different models and also did technical interviewing for Karat for a few months.

I find it strange to talk about money in public places, but at the same time I have benefited a lot from other people sharing data openly under the Open Startups ideology, so for anyone who is interested, here are some key numbers from 2019.

I made on average $739/month, which just about pays my rent in Cape Town (first half of the year) or Zurich (second half). This is from various sources, but mainly from the technical writing I do by moonlight.

Half of the amount in the ‘writing’ category is from a single project (instructional content on SQL) where the result was not made publically available. Due to this, I charged more than usual. The rest was made up of

• Four blog posts for CodeMentor on IP GeoLocation, Text Classification, Batch endpoints for Rest APIs, and a post on transitioning your team to remote working.
• One blog post on Arc (previously CodeMentor) on interviewing DevOps Candidates
• One short guest post on Tooling vs Theory for AI
• Two posts for Repl on Machine Learning and Building WordClouds
• I also wrote a post about writing which no one paid for

Relatedly, I bought one of the last offered ‘lifetime subscriptions’ for https://leanpub.com/ and I hope to use this to publish longer form content in 2020. I used it to help my father edit and self-publish his first memoir, which is available at https://leanpub.com/doctor, and learned a lot about the publishing industry and publishing tools in the process.

The ‘editing’ section in the breakdown above is also from CodeMentor, and involves briefly reviewing and commenting on a post outline from another writer and then doing one round of suggestions on the first draft. It does not take very long, and I enjoy reading other people’s work, so I always agree to requests from them even though the money hardly makes it worth the coordination time.

Overall, having my posts scattered around the internet instead of all as “Codementor Community Articles” (tracked in the stats below) meant that my ‘tracked’ growing readership did not keep pace with what I saw in 2018. I only published 4 new articles on this main platform. More reasons for the dwindling numbers come down to:

• A lot of traffic was driven by a single post: Flask vs Django which was top of Google for related search results for some time, but has now dropped down to the third or fourth result
• CodeMentor themselves pivoted away from education and into recruitment, rebranding to Arc. I guess this means they are giving less attention to their community platform, and more readers are moving to platforms like HackerNoon and Dev.to to find tutorials. I hope to explore writing on these platforms in 2020, but I have my problems with both of them.

My posts on my CodeMentor profile got only 300’000 new views and I gained only 250 new followers in 2019. I had expected well over a million views in 2019, so this was a good reminder that past performance does not predict future results.

My CodeMentor readership stats as of January 2020:

Stats from my previous retrospective, January 2019, for comparison:

Technical interviewing

The technical interviewing section in the breakdown above was from my brief stint as a Technical Interviewer at Karat. It was lots of fun, very educational, and Karat was exceptional in providing really high quality materials to learn how to interview using their method and in providing a great and super friendly community of interviewers around the globe. I learned some valuable skills in objective assessment and making people feel comfortable in interviews, which I hope to keep honing long term. I unfortunately had to stop as I found the interviews very tiring (one hour of 1:1 interaction followed by around 30 minutes of writing up a report), and I was attempting to do them usually during the week after a day of fighting with hard technical problems, while juggling emigration (more on that later). Nonetheless, I would strongly recommend taking a look at Karat.com if you are interested in earning around $70/hour for very flexible remote work.

Royalties

The non-best selling video course I published in 2014 with PacktPub, Rapid Flask, continues to be a non-best seller. Ditto for Flask by Example which was published in 2016. These make up my only source of passive income, which has now dwindled to an impressive average of $50/month, which just about covers my various domain names and other hosting costs for side projects.

Below is all the data about the royalties I earn through the video and book. Although this income is ‘passive’ in the sense that I don’t have to do any work and I get a small amount of money deposited in my bank every quarter, it’s not really passive. The book took a huge number of hours to write and produce, and I was given only a small advance of $3000, so in reality this money is still paying off my hours from a few years ago, and will likely hit zero before that hourly rate becomes reasonable.

My goal since 2017 has been to hit $2000/month in passive income, and each year has taken me further away from that goal. I don’t believe I will be able to reverse the trend in 2020 within the constraints of full time employment, but I will continue to actively explore ideas and experiment on as many of them as possible.

Ritza

In 2019, I found myself obsessing over the ‘win-win’ I described above a lot: getting paid for content that is released for free. I wonder how this could be scaled to something larger than just me staring at my laptop long into the evening, pretending to write.

There have been so many attempts to get consumers to pay for content at scale over the last decade, but in spite of micropayments from Brave, large and intrusive begging pop-ups from The Guardian and Wikipedia, harder paywalls from the likes of WSJ, NYT, and Bloomberg, and some people finding success with individual publishing, consumers are as unwilling as ever to pay for what they read, even if it’s educational. And why should they? Companies plough trillions of dollars into targeted digital advertising, which many people predict is non-sustainable, and it is no secret that one of the best ways to win customers in many areas is to share knowledge with them for free (or even without that being that radical, traditional marketing departments continue to cry that ‘content is king’ for SEO while producing shallow clickbait content that has a negative shelf life). At the same time, location independent work is on the rise, people are realising that it’s OK to have a life outside of work with ‘work-life balance’ being a hot topic. And there still remains a strong division between ‘arts’ and ‘science’ disciplines, enforced by most universities globally, meaning that many technology experts battle to write, and many great writers think that they are ‘fundamentally not technical’.

From the above, I think there is a huge opportunity in a service that

• Employs technical experts and writing experts on a flexible, fully remote, 20h/week schedule
• Creates a publishing pipeline of topic -> drafts -> writing and coding -> editing -> technical checking -> copy editing -> design and publishing to create ‘10x content’ that unbiasedly educates readers about technology topics while showcasing the features of specific products
• Gets the companies of the above products to pay $$$ for the privilege of being featured in the high quality educational articles

Several times this year I tried to write down more details on how this could look, but writing is hard. I bought a cheap domain name, ritza.co, to give all of these ideas somewhere public to live in the hope that it would attract like minded people who would be willing to listen to me ramble and further develop the ideas.

Ritza is very much a working title which I expect to change if I ever use it, but out of interest the name comes from

• ‘Rit’ (‘go slow’ as a direction given to musicians)
• ‘za’ from South Africa
• ‘Ritz’ which is a brand that I have no first hand experience with but which I associate with high quality (people have since told me it’s icky and kitsch).

Some of my attempted drafts of a ‘pitch’ for this idea are at

• ritza.co

• https://ritza.co/content/pitch5

• https://ritza.co/content/pitch4

And even rougher material at https://github.com/sixhobbits/ritza

My final public technical tutorials for 2019 was a proof of concept to see if this idea could potentially sustain itself. I decided that the ‘MVP’ of Ritza was to coordinate at least three people:

• A writer
• An editor
• A client

The writer or editor would have to wear a few different hats as the initial model has different people for QA, copy editing, design, etc, but the core process is to give a topic to the writer, have the result improved by the editor, and sell it to the client. I wanted the topic to be educational in nature and made available to the public for free, while covering its costs (including at least some of my time).

Luckily I already had some clients, and knew some people with expertise in technology and writing who could help out with editing. I advertised on ZATech Slack for a writer and after a drawn out but informal interview process selected someone who had some technical writing experience and some coding experience. The whole process took a couple of months which was slower than freelancing writing by myself, but it worked! The result is at https://www.codementor.io/@garethdwyer/building-a-crm-app-with-nodejs-repl-it-and-mongodb-119r72mczg

Some of the challenges I found were (trigger warning, generalisations):

• Writers and other people who are closer to ‘artists’ than ‘technicians’ will complain about people wanting to “pay in exposure”, but they also are more attached to the ownership of their work and they do want exposure. Coders are very happy to write a fixed amount of code, sell it, and move on, leaving the client to own, re-sell, rework, or publish the code as they see fit. With writers, what happens to the intellectual property gets more complicated. For example, publishing the work under my codementor profile is necessary as I have a following on CodeMentor which is part of what makes the post valuable to the client, but it also makes it look like I am committing some kind of intellectual fraud by ‘stealing’ another writer’s work. I am still not sure exactly how to handle this aspect, but I hope that once enough people (instead of just 2) have worked on a single article, the feeling of ‘ownership’ will become more diluted and this will be less of an issue.
• It’s very hard to find technical writers. While the advert I posted got some strong responses, people were usually stronger either at coding or at writing, but few people had broad technical experience and were good at writing (both in terms of basic good sentence construction and more subtly being proficient at explaining technical concepts in a simple way).
• Adding more people (writers, editors, quality checkers, designers) adds a lot of inefficiency and communication overhead. Even finding a common platform to communicate (Slack, Email, WhatsApp, Google Docs, etc) was tricky. I think there is a strong element of ‘it gets worse before it gets better’ at play, as building the pipeline is difficult, but once everyone is used to the system, it should be much easier than having one person try to tackle all aspects of producing a high quality article.
• While adding more people can raise quality, it can also lower it. No one really feels the ownership that drives many informal technical writers towards perfection.

There are others, but overall it was a successful experiment and I was happy that the proof of concept worked out. In 2020, I hope to define some of the ideas in the pitches above a bit more closely and spend more time looking at the demand side of the market – are there companies out there who are willing to pay premiums for high quality content. My back of the envelope calculations and some slight market research tells me that I should aim for around $1/word, but this is higher than I have charged before and I am still exploring how large the market for this kind of work might be.

Moving to Europe and applying for visas

I decided to move to Europe this year and spent countless hours looking at how to do this while maintaining autonomy. The traditional route is to get a job or get married, but I find the idea of my country of residence being tied to either my employer or my partner to be very unsettling. The main alternatives that I looked into are:

Netherlands

• The Dutch ‘orientation’ visa. This is a visa that allows people who have studied in the Netherlands to live there commitment-free for one year, while they look for a job or work towards one of the other Dutch visas. Luckily I was eligible for this and this was the one I ended up applying for and getting. It is valid until August 2020 which is coming up fast.
• The Dutch ‘freelance’ visa. This allows you to be self-employed but you have to go through a rigorous process to prove that you can sustain yourself and that you have clients in NL. If I had spent the 12 months from the Orientation Visa focusing on building a client base in NL, I think this could have worked well for me.
• The Dutch ‘startup’ visa. This also allows you to stay in NL without traditional employment, but the application process is even more onerous than the freelancer one, and requires you to be part of a recognised incubator, most of which charge up to $500/month. I looked at a few of these recognised incubators and I am in contact with a few of them, and I hope to keep this as an option for 2020.
• PayRolling Services: there is apparently no shortage of companies who are willing to put you on their payroll in return for a fee (also around $500/month from what I gather, though I haven’t investigated too deeply). This allows you to freelance while looking like an employee, which makes many things easier and can also help with visas. They look exceptionally dodgy at first, but after talking to some people, including one expensive immigration lawyer, the practice seems fairly well regulated and supported by Governments, especially in NL. I would consider this as an option for 2020 too.
• Partnership visa: the Dutch are more liberal than most countries in Europe and allow you to get a partnership visa without being married. You have to have been in a monogamous relationship for 6 months or more with an EU national who lives in NL, and there are some onerous requirements to prove that your relationship is real and some frighteningly short timelines of what to do in the case of a break-up, but this is a step forward from requiring marriage. We briefly looked at this option before Isabel decided to take a job in Zurich instead of Amsterdam.

United Kingdom

• The UK offers a ‘Tier 1’ visa, which offer far more more autonomy than ‘Tier 2’ visas. It is called the “Exceptional Talent” visa and is for high achievers in fields of science & medicine, engineering, humanities, digital technology, and arts & culture. I was very happy to discover this option as I thought I met all of the requirements (including being in a leadership position in digital technology, being able to demonstrate that you are helping push technological research, being a lifelong learner, and contributing to technology communities), and it offered a good deal of autonomy (no requirements to spend time in the UK, remain with a specific employer, remain employed, and a fast track option to permanent residence) and I spent many hours on the application process, putting together countless documents and ‘evidence’ and also significantly inconveniencing three people I had previously worked with for recommendation letters that had to follow very specific guidelines. I was fairly optimistic, but received a very definite and harsh rejection, which was a good reality check for me.

Switzerland

• Some cantons in Switzerland, including Zurich, also offer a ‘partnership’ visa (amusingly called the ‘concubine visa’) which allows residence with a partner without being married. I have just submitted an application for one of these and hope to hear a response in a few weeks. As it is not a national visa, there is very little official information on it, but I by chance met someone who had gotten one, and shortly afterwards met someone else who also had one. Between the information they shared, information from some internet forums, and some information from the migrational office, we managed to piece together most of the requirements. In Zurich (much stricter than Basel), these include a relationship of at least 3 years, proof of financial stability, language proficiency, and more. I printed out nearly 100 pages in the end to hand to the embassy, and we expect them to still request more documentation.

• Switzerland also offers a startup visa, but it looks like it is exceptionally rare and difficult to get.

Germany

• Germany also offers a freelance visa, with slightly more lenient requirements than NL. I have not looked too deeply into this one.

Overall I applied for 7 visas/permits this year (including an SA passport renewal, which was the worst experience of the lot). I received 4, got rejected for one, and am still awaiting a response from the last one. These are

• The orientation year visa for the NL (received)
• An MVV for the NL (a short visa required to collect the residence permit) (received)
• A Schengen Visa for Switzerland (received)
• A partnership visa for Switzerland (submitted)
• A Tier 1 ‘exceptional talent’ visa for the UK (rejected, under appeal)
• A general visitor visa for the UK (received)

I did not track the visa fees, travel costs and sundry expenses (not to mention the hours spent and frustrations caused) from all of these applications, but it definitely comes to far more than seems fair considering all I want to do is walk on different pieces of our globe and talk to and work with people from different countries and cultures. Which connects nicely to my next topic: anarchism.

Book highlights from 2019

Last year, I read mainly non-fiction and for the first time started sampling the ‘business’ and ‘management’ sections of bookshops. I continued reading some titles from these sections and continued finding them to be 90% bullshit, but I’ll put it down to a guilty pleasure for now.

I also started exploring some other areas, mainly in finance, economics and politics. The highlights were

• Noam Chomsky. I read the whole of ‘How the World Works’ and several sections of half a dozen or so of his other books. There is a lot of repetition, but I was surprised to learn more about Anarchism and how the common-usage of the term has polluted the political theory, which is very different from the ‘chaos’ definition. ‘What is Anarchism’ is a great video introduction. I had mainly come across Chomsky for his work in Computer Science, and somewhat in Linguistics before, but had never engaged with his political works. I found the fact that he can be so knowledgeable about all three fields to be inspiring and many of his reports about the actions by the US government and big corporations to be eye-opening. Noam Chomsky also talks a lot about ‘wage slaves’ and about how the fact that we have come to accept the requirement of working 40 hours a week for 50+ years is recent and far from natural, which ties very well into some of the concepts I had started developing under the ‘ritza’ umbrella.

• Bull! A history of the boom and the bust. A long read and definitely not a page turner, but it was interesting to see more context, history, detail, and nuance in “we’re in a tech bubble”; “no we’re not” debate that I see almost daily on the internet. I’m still ‘team bubble’, but I have been since 2014 when I first started understanding how markets work, and I’m very aware that there is no credit in calling a bubble every year until it happens. I also read Too Big To Fail and a few other books about finance and US banking that go into more depth than the Michael Lewis books I had read before.

• I made decent progress in People, Power, and Profits, but found it fairly repetitive, and dropped it around 60% of the way through. Until recently I rarely left a book unfinished if I made it past one chapter, but I have recently read more about the idea that each book primarily teaches you one new concept or framework, and it’s often not necessary to read the entire book in order to get 80% of the benefit from it.

• I read most of Skin in the Game, but found it very inferior compared to Fooled by Randomness, which for me is still the best book by Taleb, and has the least condescension and obvious arrogance, but instead more hard details about interesting ideas. I might be biased though as I have a soft spot for probability, having come across it several times while studying mathematics, computer science, and philosophy.

• I really enjoyed Bad Blood, and strongly believe that we will see many similar stories in 2020 as the cheap glitter starts to fall off some of the largest tech startups and unicorns.

Inspirations

I continue to be inspired by the ‘maker’ crowd online. Although the bullshit in this space is noticeably growing with its profitability, there is still a very good signal:noise ratio in the community overall, and some inspirational figures such as:

• Pieter Levels https://levels.io/ who started NomadList and various other highly popular services single handedly. I finally bought a lifetime subscription while it was on special, and although the community isn’t as good as I was hoping (filled with people trying to make a quick buck, and run off a free slack channel where the lack of message history is frustrating), I have made one or two good connections through there, and it is a good place to meet people on short notice while travelling.

• AJ from carrd.co – another service that I have admired for many years and finally opened my wallet to this year. I used the premium version of Carrd to create https://flaskbyexample.com/ for my book, https://conceptconcerts.co.za/ for my sister’s classical music company, https://startyourown.co/ for a project I started at the beginning of the year but dropped, and a few others.

• Cory Zue (http://www.coryzue.com/) who I met in Cape Town and had some very good conversations with. I have been following his posts closely and his humbleness and openness along with the fact that he is actually executing and not just talking continues to inspire.

I’m already a month behind because I have been on the road (well train tracks) since January the 1st and only got back home yesterday, but here’s to reading this in 11 months’ time and cringing slightly!