Week 28 Retrospective

The streak is over, but the Drakensberg is awesome.

After five straight weeks of increasing revenue, Place Card Me had it’s first dip this week, going from $6 down to $5 last week.

Place Card Dashboard

Added “external revenue” column for Etsy and fixed all the bugs with misreporting numbers this week

Interestingly, all 5 sales came from Etsy this week, which now puts Etsy sales higher than sales directly on the site. About 95% of the people that make cards come from Google, but about 50% of the people that pay come from Etsy. So am going to have to absorb that and incorporate it into my future strategy.

Goal Report Card

# Project / Area Goal Grade
1 Place cards 3 more designs, one product effort B
2 Writing Invest four hours in it doing something. A-
3 Django Draft Pycon talk A
4 Generate Revenue Continue pushing / working on freelancing engagements B

Comments

  1. Made three designs but didn’t do much else besides some customer support and bug fixes.
  2. Published “the future” which got a positive reception from the people that have been keeping close tabs on me. Wasn’t expecting it to do much outside that circle.
  3. Spent a lot of time working on this talk. I think it’s almost done, though is hard to tell whether it’s good. Either way has been a fun departure from regular work.
  4. Invested a bit less time in consulting work this week due to taking more time off.

Time

Another slightly lighter week due to travel and time off.

Week 28 time breakdown

Week 28 time breakdown

For the first time during the sabbatical “physical and mental health” is at the top of the time list! This mostly due to some long hikes in the Drakensberg.

The rest of the time was dominated by consulting and working on my PyCon talk (arbitrarily filed under “networking”), with the regular four-ish hours on place cards.

Life

Spent the weekend in the Drakensberg, a.k.a. the “Mountain of the Dragons” in Afrikaans. It’s aptly named. I felt like Dany and Drogon might pop out and soar through the sky at any moment.

We did two longish hikes—the first to Blind Man’s Corner in Monk’s Cowl, which is in Central Drakensberg. It was some beautiful scenery and very diverse, with rolling hills, massive plateaus, forests, and shear peaks dotting the skyline.

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The second hike was called Tugela Gorge, where you follow the banks (and later the bed) of the Tugela river up into the Amphitheater, which according to Wikipedia, “is widely regarded as one of the most impressive cliff faces on earth”.

This hike had a bit of everything, lazy strolls alongside a river, boulder-hopping upstream, walking through a gorge/tunnel reminiscent of Petra, scrambling up cliffs, and of course amazing vistas of the ‘Berg and Amphitheater.

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Tonight we fly back to Cape Town for a return to “normal” life. The East Coast has treated us well!

—Cory