Today I turned 38

Today I turned 38 1

I decided to start this blog as an attempt to document my “recovery”. What is this “recovery”? I quit my job a little over a decade ago. It was a big-tech job that paid a pretty good Software Engineering salary. I had convinced myself that I could create more value on my own than I could by continuing to work there.

Since then, I’ve done very little in terms of creating value. Hence the recovery.

Initially “value” was defined as helping people. In that context, it would have likely been helping users/customers of whatever I was going to create. At this point, “creating value” is just part of my goal. I’d also like to start a family and focus on my health.

If anyone comes across this, it probably means I hit my goal. This will likely be a terrible first post. I almost don’t want to write that since it means I’m just creating an excuse for making this terrible. But maybe that actually helps get past the writer’s block? I don’t know. I’m just freestyling here…

I plan on documenting my journey from 38 to 40. That is the purpose of this blog. I also hope it might help someone else.

It might be helpful to know what I’ve been doing over the last decade. I plan on keeping the blog anonymous to start so it I can’t go into a ton of detail.

Let’s start with the bad:

  • I’ve mostly messed around with building a bunch of apps that never saw the light of day 2
  • In terms of other aspects, I played an embarrassing amount of video games
  • and smoked a ridiculous amount of weed.

The good:

  • I quit smoking about 5 years ago and haven’t smoked since 3.
  • I’ve built a gym habit 3-4 times/week for the last year with maybe 2-3 weeks off (mostly due to getting sick and wanting to avoid getting my personal trainer sick).
  • I have one app that’s been published and marketed. It’s doing ok.
    • Making a little over $2k MRR
    • Growth in 2025 was much slower than 2024 because I stopped marketing
    • Started marketing again over the last couple months so it’s recovering

The future:

I don’t have specific goals in mind for this time period, but a few vague ones:

  • Get married
  • Have my first kid
  • Continue to focus on my health
    • Get abs (this one was pretty close earlier this year, but I regressed a bit)
  • Create a successful business that supports my family
    • This might include taking a short-term hit of getting a job to handle every day expenses
    • I don’t want my wife to work while my kids are young. That’s important to me
  • Create multiple apps for the ideas I have in my mind
  • Improve my skills as a software engineer which I feel have atrophied

After typing those all out, it does seem indeed like I have some specific goals.

This blog

Initially I wasn’t sure at what frequency I’d like to publish here, but I think I’ll try to do something daily. I may include just a check-in of how the day went, but I’ll also try to document any insights I’ve made. Maybe I’ll be able to create some value here too :)

I’m going to try to keep it lightweight. This first post is probably quite a bit longer than I’d been hoping for. It’s fine though. No one will get to this line unless I’ve created something whose journey is worthy of tracking.

I had one goal of publishing this on my birthday so even though the quality isn’t quite there, this will be publicly available. I look forward to pointing back to this moment (or publishing a Prince or Persia style book someday!)

I’ll end it here since I’m now beginning to play around with markdown styling. Until tomorrow, internet stranger 🫡

Footnotes

  1. I had initially made a typo (or Freudian slip?) in the title by saying “Today I turned 24”. That’s how old I was when I had started my last job. Quit when I was 28. Side note: starting off the very first line of my first post of my blog is a pretty wild style! ↩

  2. This is a bit of a lie. I built them and they were publicly available, but I didn’t market them which is almost the same as never publishing them. ↩

  3. I took a puff from a joint at a concert about 2 years ago while very drunk. I don’t remember feeling high so in my mind it doesn’t count. ↩