Year of Output
What is Andy doing in 2024?
Timespan: 2024
Published: 2024-01-02
It is 2024, and I am leaving my grad studies. I have no job prospects, and no startup money. I have enough savings for a year of living. If my life were a company, this would be my runway. To extend the analogy, I am trying to find Andy-Market Fit.
I always felt that if I were given free rein to follow my curiosity for a while, I would be able to make something cool and useful. At the end of high school, I tried to take a gap year. My parents told me to do it after I finished college. As college ended and I considered grad school, I wanted to take a year off to work on personal projects. My parents encouraged me to get my graduate degree first.
Now, after a year of graduate studies, I realize this will never end. I wanted security, and there is never enough security. There is always more school to finish, more money to save, more career to further before making any leap. I am going to use what I know now to sustain myself. I am going to stop sinning.
The Plan
This year has no script. I am going to follow my curiosity and rely on my animal mind to stumble onto something good.
To save myself from sloth, I am instituting one rule — every day I will post something, anything: a video, two sentence tweet, a blog post, project milestone, a letter to a friend. If I'm not on a path to becoming self-sustaining by 2025, total freedom is not for me, and I'll go ahead and get a job like the promising young man I used to be.
We are calling 2024 the Year of Output.
Keeping up with Andy
My daily output will span my web presence. I will be active on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Medium, my website, Github, Stack Overflow, Twitter — any website with an audience and a post button.
You can follow along via this monthly newsletter I'm starting. I'll post a monthly progress report and retrospective, and it'll also be a good way for me to review. It'll be posted in the updated version of this blog post in a day or two. If you're reading this and there's no link, congrats on being one of the first readers of this post!
Supporting Andy
I started a Patreon, you can subscribe here! I just need 300 people who think I'm cool and want to give me money every month, and then I can do this forever.
For accountability, I will maintain the list of outputs below, though this project page may not update every day. I'm also thinking about mirroring the list to the front page of my site to see it better — you'll know it if you see it.
2024 Year Of Output
January
Wallet weight tweet
Short quantity of butter
hamster tweet
- Jan 7: Shots for a long video, Colpitts oscillator which doesn't work
A sneak peek
Stroop performance gets better if I sleep more. As my mom would say, Duh!
- Jan 11: Checking if Bionic Reading helps you read faster
- Jan 12: Shots for 18-wheeler-tailgating video.
- Jan 13: Planning - big sheet
- Jan 14: Website update (added word count to blog posts)
- Jan 15: New circuit. Blog post about Fitbit's terrible data practices (here)
- Jan 16: main project 1
- Jan 17: main project 1, updated Strooper extension (removed colors from test buttons)
- Jan 18: AMAZING meeting with Mr. Guzey, various logistical comms re: main project 1
- Jan 19: Correspondence
- Jan 20-Jan 25: Incapacitated by personal matter.
- Jan 26: Blog post on main project 2, added chapter counters to blog.
Example of the header chapter counters. I can also add a table of contents
February
- Feb 6: Blog post CS major's guide to I2C
- Feb 7: Posted about main project 1, implantables. Also on Twitter.
- Feb 8: Comm with RF wizard
- Feb 9: Applied for Flux Capacitor, a 1517 grant
- Feb 10: Driver Apple Watch tweet
- Feb 11: Ordered parts for impedance matching
- Feb 12: Last blog post on Fitbit timezone correction, this time using Google location data. Link
- Feb 13: Looked into potential research collab
- Feb 14-21: Trip to Vitalia.city and shitposted a bit.
- 14: Arrived, met James and Rochelle
- 15: Met Fraiz and Cass, demo'd power over skin
- 17: Explored West End
- 18: Meat Dinner, met colonist.io guy
- 19: Designed implantables rev4
- 20: Talked with Fraiz and Cass about possible apps given power constraints. Kayaking with friends
- 21: Left
- Feb 22: Post about [Vitalia](../../blog/vitalia1)
- Feb 23-28: Trip to Boston
- 23: Went to NTBOS event, met Max
- 24: Free lunch @ Harvard
- 25: Met K and talked about beetles
- 26: Blink detector tweet
- 27: Saw Adrian, King Dashboard discussion
- 28: Blink rate vs Tetris/Twitter tweet
- Feb 29: Took pictures for tiny solar cell blog post
March
- Mar 14: Learned how small 7-segment displays can get
- Mar 15: Tweet thread on blood lead concentration
- Mar 16: First post on ResearchHub, a cryptocurrency research platform. I like the vision, but nobody engaged with my post.
- Mar 17: First therapy
- Mar 18: Parsing Apple Health sleep data, helped a friend with a PCB
- Mar 19: Combining Apple health with Fitbit sleep data
- Mar 20: Thrift store with Elio
- Mar 21: Talked to Max
- Mar 22: Calculator video, went climbing with Phu
- Mar 23: Dietrich party with the Good Will Hunting squad
- Mar 24: Disassembled a vape pen, took pics for future blog post
- Mar 25: Medium post on how to properly deep sleep the XIAO nRF52840 board
- Mar 26: Gradient generating code for figures. Hopefully will not have to remake that.
- Mar 27: Observations on the Vision Pro video stream here
- Mar 28: Chris "celebrated problem" debate, no progress on getting e-ink display working. Added abstract to PCS.
- Mar 29: Shot hero figure pictures for the paper
- Mar 30: Experienced PGH BBQ with Ezra and M
- Mar 31: First user study completed, deadline very close
April
- Apr 1: Catch up with Frido!
- Apr 2: Notes from reading the ICNIRP guidelines — I should write a blog post on this eventually.
- Apr 3: UIST paper submission completed!
- Apr 4: Completed video on my UIST paper, can't wait to show you guys!
- Apr 5: Tweet thread about how much time it took to finish the paper.
- Apr 6: Took pics of dino toy printer camera for power consumption blog post, hosted gamer party
- Apr 7: Blog post about power consumption of a children's toy camera I got in China.
- Apr 8: Eclipse day!
- Apr 9: So much Blender, redid head scan with a handheld 3D scanner
- April 10: Transplanted my face onto my face in Blender. Memes ensued
- Apr 11: Printed big head candle mold
May
June
July
August
- July 27 - Aug 5: Fidget Camp in SF! Great event hosted by some amazing creatives and technologists
- Aug 7-11: Brain Hack in Mill Valley. Worked with cool people on a new way to do EEG
- Aug 12: Back to Boston!
- Aug 25: Blog post about the R1801K, an energy harvesting chip
- Aug 26: First pull request to an open source project
- Aug 28: Moved into The Future house
- Aug 29: Crazy day in Seattle. Saw everyone that I knew was there
- Aug 30-Sep 1: Went to Vancouver, experienced Farm Camp! Olympics, Talent show, sleeping in tents, buddhist ceremony. Felt incredible for weeks afterwards
September
- Sep 7: Discovered that all vacuum flasks have a non-evaporable getter pellet in them to maintain vacuum. How dope!
- Sep 8: Yerba haul
- Sep 12: Made DIY laser profilometer that slots into a 30mm cage system
- Sep 13: Soft launch of our magneto-optical trap in a tweet
- Sep 14-15: Ishaan visiting for HackMIT
- Sep 16: Went to this crazy plasma guy's workshop
- Sep 18: Acquired a couch from the street
- Sep 19: Got Stelo CGM, injected it
- Sep 20: Got a messenger bag from PD. Best purchase I've made in a while
- Sep 21: Housewarming party!
- Sep 23: Exchanged old backpack for a huge mug and dinner
- Sep 25: Went to medical devices trade fair.
- Sep 28: Went to Rhode Island. Slept 12 hours.
October
- Oct 1: Evaluated RFID energy harvesting using the BQ25504. Not really viable.
- Oct 2: Got these 90 degree glasses. Really stupidly fun
- Oct 4: Tried ultrasonic softening of metal. Video here
- Oct 5: Destroyed Stelo CGM after it expired
- Oct 6: Blog post about the Stelo CGM
- Oct 9: Made an RF amplifier using the THS3491
- Oct 10: Party!
- Oct 11: Demo of Power-over-Skin for the NSF director Panch
- Oct 12: Demo of Power-over-Skin at the CMU UIST Pre-party. It was great, you should've been there!
- Oct 13: Demo of Power-over-Skin at the UIST Workshop "Soft Wearables" hosted by Cat and Cedric. Also great
- Oct 14: My first first-author conference talk. Also demo of Power-over-Skin at the UIST Demo Session, which we barely got into thanks to the efforts of Eric Whitmire, god bless
- Oct 15: Tweet thread about Power-over-Skin, Kinda blew up, god bless. I'm 1/3 of the way to Twitter monetization, bless up
- Oct 17: Ate my first MRE. Glad to know our troops are eating good.
- Oct 20: Tried to reproduce the pixelizer lens from Twitter.
- Oct 21: Laser Holograms project page
- Oct 22: Power-over-Skin project pagee
- Oct 26: Conviction
- Oct 27: Gave hackathon talk at ekkolapto