Living a calm and productive life in the Philippines since October 2018. Prior to that, we lived in New York City for almost a decade.
After working for media companies in the past six years with News Deeply and Cignal TV, I’m currently doing innovation and product work for the Palawan Pawnshop Group, the Philippines’ leading non-bank financial services provider. Our flagship service, PalawanPay, launched in April of 2022 (now with over 10 million users).
Fintech is a lot of fun. I’m learning a lot. This is probably the biggest product I’ve ever handled (and it’s growing pretty fast!).
As for my side projects, Slavatar remains. It will actually end up paying for all my failed (but worth it) experiments. Not bad for a thousand dollar investment I made all the way back in 2015. Still thinking of what to experiment on next. Digital Media will always be a thing in my world so I might do something fun there in the future.
I still maintain a nano-consulting practice with Southpaw Labs LLC, with a few clients on retainer. Side projects are great ways to augment your professional development. I highly recommend it.
The pandemic has changed us in a lot of ways. I’m just happy that we managed to survive all of that. Now that things are back to normal, I do miss the absence of traffic, having more time with the kids at home and a whole slew of positive things from the lockdown that’s rapidly fading away. It feels like 2019 again.
I recently finished the 2023 TCS London Marathon and I’m so happy to back in my quest to complete the majors (Boston is just a bonus, I’ll be happy with five stars). Now that I’ve got my marathon out of the way for the year, I can finally hop back on my bike and resume my love affair with cycling, something I picked up from the pandemic years.
I’m currently obsessed with the following:
- Digital Gardens – I’ve been doing a considerable bit of (private) digital gardening the moment I transitioned to Notion (from Evernote) back in 2017. I do all sorts of stuff in Notion, ranging from my yearly dashboard, hobby logs(!), a system to process loose paper notes, weekly meal plans, shopping trackers and all sorts of stuff. I’ve performed way too many garden “remodelings” through the years and these continue to evolve. Notion recently released an AI upgrade which I’ve used in some occasions. I think it’s pretty great.
- Story Formats – Playing with freeform tools like Notion and Day One gave me an opportunity to experiment with story formats. Story formats can be described as templates to convey a certain message. Think “Hot Ones”, “Wordle” and “Humans of New York”. I’ve been experimenting with monthly recaps, show recaps, media diet posts, etc in my private journal. The newsletter “Formats Unpacked” by Hugh Garry explains this better than I do. It’s also a great way to practice my writing as well.
- Revenue Exploration Studios – I like the idea of institutionalized innovation. I read Prehype’s “Acorn Method” book and loved it so much. It’s so good to see my current job through these lens.
I still do the following:
Record all my exercises in Strava, log food in MyFitnessPal, scrobble music in Last.FM, track app usage in Rescuetime, checkin in via the Swarm App, play Wordle and tally finances in Moneywell.
Keeping up with my Goodreads reading quota. I recently enjoyed “Build” by Tony Fadell, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin and “Exit Stage Left” by Nick Duernden. I’ve been watching a lot too and I loved Disney+’s “Andor” a lot (which led me into a rabbit hole with the “Mandalorian” and “Book of Boba Fett”).
Writing at least 1200 words a day on the DayOne app but it’s been going way, way over that lately. I should learn to be more concise. I also started meditating again via the Headspace app.
I’m curious about:
Gold! Personal Holding Companies. Personal Creative Studios. The right amount of exercise.