Welcome back to what is essentially an annual newsletter 🥲. In this issue, find out why digital gardening didn’t work for me, how I want to own my content, and my new gig combining accounting and data engineering.

Obsidian’s graph view was very fun to look at, but I quickly realised that it wasn’t going to really help with my writing.

A reflection on digital gardening

In my previous newsletter, I was singing the praises of digital gardens, and how they were supposed to lower the barrier for entry for writing.

Well, I’m pleased to report that it was successful in lowering the barrier to entry, I’ve added many notes to my garden, from new Julia packages to the economy of Somalia. However, I still failed to produce any substantial writing 😕.

The whole “idea emergence” thing, where if I link notes together and then somehow use the network to generate new ideas, didn’t really work for me.

Whenever I tried to synthesise my thoughts, the result looked more like a review of related literature than anything original or “emergent”. I felt compelled to stick to the confines of the linked material, rather than consciously think through the topic and form my thoughts.

Another reason I decided to abandon full-blown digital gardening is that I realised that the end product wasn’t really enjoyable to read. My garden was overgrown, and it became too much work to “tend” to it. You could start on a very polished note and then end up with the bits and ends which are of no value to anyone but me.

Publish on your site, syndicate elsewhere (POSSE)

Yet another iteration of this website, hopefully it’ll stick! 🤞

If you’re getting this newsletter in your inbox and the sender is unfamiliar, it’s because I’ve moved over to a service called Micro.Blog. It started as a kickstarter in 2017 and has grown since then. The same privacy policy applies — your email is only used to send you this newsletter and nothing else.

If there’s one thing that Twitter’s chaotic few years has pushed me to do, is to make sure all the content I create isn’t confined to one place. Micro.blog’s founder Manton Reece has written a book that lays out his vision for people to blog on their domain names and syndicate that out with feeds.

I resonate with that vision.

I post all my writing, including microposts (or tweets, or toots, or whatever you call them), on tjpalanca.com first (publish your own site). Afterward, a combination of micro.blog’s syndication tools, Zapier, and Buffer, syndicate the content out to Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, Medium, and any other network, protocol, or site now and in the future.

If any of these networks decides it no longer wants to exist, my content is still safely, and originally, on my website.

Working at Titanium Birch: Standardising disparate data feeds for investment reporting and accounting

I started a new role as CFO / Software Engineer at Titanium Birch, a single family office started by the co-founder of ExpressVPN.

I’ve written a blog post on the company blog about what we have been working on recently — turning data feeds from disparate banks and brokers into useful and actionable reports and financial statements.

It’s quite interesting to apply a data engineering lens to a very well established problem such as bookkeeping — the underlying principles remain the same: standardise your source feeds into objects, and then obey that interface when creating business objects — this allows standardisation code and analysis code to evolve independently.

That’s the first installment — hoping I can keep up my newsletter habit, at least for the next trip around the sun. See you on the next one!