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So what happened? For about a year and a half, I worked on adding GraphQL as an internal API layer within Etsy. I’m proud of the work that I did. I was given an incredible amount of latitude to design and build the support for it. It’s some of the best engineering that I’ve ever done. Adding an entire API layer to a medium-sized company is hard, but we successfully launched, got some people using it, got some wins, and were growing it. Yet there were serious staffing challenges on the project. At the beginning of 2020, we were 2 engineers and were promised 2 more would be added. The 2 promised headcount vanished at the beginning of the pandemic, and the other engineer was unable to work for vast swaths of the year. Consequently, I worked alone for most of the year. It was too much for me. Working on a growing an API layer and working by myself was burning me out. Taking a 6 week break and working on another team didn’t shake this feeling for me. Problems like this are difficult to fix. Hiring takes months. Onboarding and ramping up takes months. So this was a problem that would take roughly 6 months to fix.
I want to emphasize that Etsy is a great place to work. I would work there again. If you don’t work there, you should seriously consider it. They pay well and the work is meaningful. My situation was an edge case. A lot of Etsy’s practices were developed while it was a small or a medium-sized company. But make no mistake: it is rounding the bend to being a large company: It just entered the S&P 500. Sometimes it takes scale and growth to uncover problems. Things that worked at the smaller scale break when the company is three times larger. I encountered one of these growing pains, but it’s the kind that the company will learn how to avoid over time.
So I’m setting out on my own. I’ve been inspired by the stories that I’ve heard on the Indie Hackers podcast . Unlike many, I am so fortunate that 2020 improved my financial footing. My expenses went down and my savings went up. Accordingly, I’m in the best position of my life to start a new business that can be successful. I started a company called Jaunty, Inc. using Stripe Atlas.
I’m waiting for the IRS to issue my EIN, which will allow me to set up a business bank account and have fully-separated finances. But the IRS is currently backlogged. In fact, the IRS won’t even respond to the question “has it been issued yet?” until I’ve been waiting for 45 days, and I’ve been waiting for 30. Accordingly, I’ve been trying to learn skills that I can reuse when I can have separated finances.
Hopefully, I’ll have some good news to report in the new year. I expect that I will be able to try and fail at 3 ideas during 2021. Hopefully, one of the three will start to get some traction, and I will be able to get some revenue. My 2021 goal is to to rent out a tiny private office. If I learned anything from the pandemic, it’s that I need a separation between my personal space and my work space.
The most stress I encountered was probably the period between the 2020 election and the period where Joe Biden was announced the winner, with the second-most being the following period where it was unclear whether democracy would hold in the United States, and the following period was reading about the George Floyd protests and seeing the widespread police violence against protestors. I have a nervous habit of chewing my nails when I’m thinking or nervous, and this evolved into literally chewing open sores into my fingers. Thankfully these have mostly healed. At this point, I can handle lemons and limes again without fear. In 2020, I donated a lot of money to causes (Biden’s campaign, organizations like Black Girls Code that bolster education for underrepresented minorities in tech, and organizations that seek to selectively replace policing with policies targeted to specific problems), but I didn’t donate much time this year. I don’t know how to feel about this.
My girlfriend is a professional translator and précis writer. She is extremely concerned with the precise definitions of words. This means that I had the misfortune of learning the difference between the terms coronavirus (a class of viruses), novel coronavirus (a placeholder name before a significant coronavirus strain is named), SARS-CoV-2 (the official name of the virus causing the current pandemic), and COVID-19 (the human disease caused by SARS-CoV-2). Why misfortune? Because I watched people use them interchangeably and incorrectly all year, while also knowing that it wasn’t worth correcting them. This was my small 2020 cross to bear.
2021
My biggest focus for 2021 is getting Jaunty, Inc. on a sustainable course. I would like to end the year by paying myself enough of a salary to cover all of my monthly expenses, and also to be able to rent an office somewhere. $10k-15k in monthly revenue is the line where many people can start doing this. This would put me close to hiring my first employee, but that’s getting ahead of myself.
I’m only going to permanently switch away from Gmail once. I won’t be switching to the 2020 version of HEY. I hope that they continue to evolve the email client in a thoughtful way. I can imagine myself switching to a future iteration of HEY based on its privacy stance and its speed.
Please consider donating to Black Girls Code. When I was growing up, I had access to high school classes about programming and a computer in my bedroom which allowed me to hone these skills. I'd like everyone to have this kind of access to opportunities. https://www.blackgirlscode.com/ I donated $500, but please consider donating even if it's $5.
2020 year in review: living in interesting times