Howdy! Been a minute. Between an intense contract and the election, my writing fell off a cliff this year – all of it. Newsletter, journalling, fiction, email – all of it. I owe several of you messages, which I expect to get to over the next few days.

This has been an absolute beast of a year. Good in many ways but rough. "Type 2 fun," my therapist says. A learning to surf, thru-hike kind of year.

This was the year that I finally built an application – StoryTime – a work tracker for Extreme Programming and balanced teams. It's not publicly available yet, but you can sign up for a demo if you want. I'll have more to say about this when I can share some screenshots, but for now: It's the project management software that I wish existed.

I spent a lot of the year vaguely but significantly ill. Constant, chronic fatigue. Daily naps. I wrote about this in August but I am still feeling improvements. I started going to the gym a few weeks ago and have been amazed at how fast I have improved at running. Oxygen. It's incredible stuff.

I didn't write about it much at the time, but getting sick like that – not a specific illness, just a vague sense that something is wrong – colored my entire year. It was a part of why I left the job I had at the beginning of the year, and why in turn I spent the year working on StoryTime. It's funny – writing my own application from scratch, running my own business – these are things that I both have been meaning to do for literally decades, and that I got kind of backed into this year by circumstance.

I think that's how life goes, a lot of the time. Sometimes these big, secret, embarrassing goals – you can't go at them head on, deliberately. They need to be gotten at sideways.

This was also the year of FinTech. I am now, officially, a person who understands ACH transfers – and has initiated about $9 million of them. I can mostly explain the difference between a debit and a credit from memory. I know the difference between an ACH, a wire, and a book transfer.

I genuinely enjoy working on financial infrastructure. It's important work – satisfying, unglamorous, keep-the-lights-on kind of stuff. It's not all that technically difficult, but it requires sharp conceptual clarity, and a command of details.

I don't want to write too much about the election, or about politics generally, but this has been another low-grade background hum underneath everything this year.

The main thing I have to say about it is: Most of the media around you, much of the software that you use, is deeply committed to keeping you angry, and afraid. Many of the people around you are committed to you being angry and afraid, because they are, and it's easier to be afraid together.

But the problem with being afraid together is that it feeds on itself. Amplifies itself. You get more afraid, and less useful.

I've spent a lot of this year trapped in a kind of loop. I get anxious. I look for something to get relief from the anxiety. I open my phone, or my laptop, and I look online at some kind of news or social media. I get more anxious.

I spent the first Trump administration stuck in a kind of macro version of that loop. I was on Twitter, and I was on corporate Slack, and I was posting. A terrible thing would happen, and I'd post about it, and then that thing would ricochet off of everyone else's social media feeds. And I got rewarded for this – the likes, the retweets, the little Slack emojis. A gigantic anxiety reflection and amplification chamber.

I've spent a lot of energy over the last few years trying to step away from that. Venting less. Choosing to be more optimistic. Calmer. Especially at work, and about work.

I am afraid of going back to that place where we are all angry and all talking about being angry, all the time – angry about things that are far away, or that haven't happened yet.

This year:

The main thing is to properly launch StoryTime, and then finish building out the fundamental feature set. I expect that to take most of the year.

I'd also like to get the various tendrils of my online presence cleaned up. I've sprawled out a bit across a few platforms, let a few projects go fallow without actually ending them, and I'd like to get that all tightened up.

Maybe another Big Walk. This probably won't be a major writing year, but it's good to spend some time in that space from time to time.

That's all I've got for you for now. Good luck out there.

- Nat