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.

Tabloid-style poster reading Build Your Dreams Before Someone Else Hires You To Build Theirs

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

Wallet weight tweet

Short quantity of butter

Short quantity of butter

hamster tweet

hamster tweet

A sneak peek

A sneak peek

Stroop performance gets better if I sleep more. As my mom would say, Duh!

Stroop performance gets better if I sleep more. As my mom would say, Duh!

Example of the header chapter counters. I can also add a table of contents

Example of the header chapter counters. I can also add a table of contents

February

YouTube thumbnail titled Guessing My Car Passcode With Math, with Andy squinting beside a Ford keypad

Tweet showing an Apple Watch on a custom leather strap that tilts it into a driver watch

Map of Alabama covered in blue Google location dots tracing highways, with a latitude-longitude tooltip

Selfie holding a large orange starfish in the ocean, with a snorkeler friend smiling behind

March

Vision Pro demo view of a classroom filled with floating copies of Andy's disembodied head

Microscope view of a tiny 7-segment display die with gold bond pads, one segment glowing green

Gloved hand holding a disassembled vape pen's tiny PCB, with the casing and mouthpiece scattered behind

Human body silhouette shaded with a rainbow heatmap gradient from head to feet

April

Crescent-shaped eclipse shadows projected as a grid of spots on a dark surface

Hand holding a large 3D-printed low-poly head, the mold master for the big head candle

May

June

Three-step sequence of cutting open a plaster mold and pulling out a head-shaped wax candle

July

August

September

Glass-roofed pavilion glowing at night beside a canal walkway, city buildings lit behind

October

Fingers holding the coin-sized circuit board pulled from a Stelo CGM sensor

Attendees chatting through a glass wall covered in marker doodles at the CMU UIST pre-party

Andy at the UIST podium beneath a Power-over-Skin title slide showing a tiny device on a fingertip

November