02122023

It has been a good week:

• The workshop passed final inspections for electrical and the interior walls. I have some trim work and getting the light mounted before I really start moving into the shop. The studio has a lot of finish work left to do, so that will be a while.
  
  One thing of note was the final inspection was all done via Skype. It went pretty smooth. He called within minute of the schedule time and I just tested the GFCIs and then showed video of anything he asked about.
  
• I have been thinking a lot about lists this week. This is mainly in the context of business ideas. For my day job I work with a lot of data systems, taxonomies, internal company tools. It would be great to apply that to an indie project. I look at something like layoffs.fyi and think…. “I could have done that”, but of course I didn’t. There are other sites that at their base they are just lists that have been gathered, curated and presented in a useful manner. Presumably the data collection is not available elsewhere or it is processed or presented novelly. In the case of layoffs.fyi, it just seems like they are on top of the news, and add a row to an Airtable. Good for them… they saw a need and filled it. I am just on the look out for similar opportunities.
  
  Based on the above I did start to play around with Airtable. I was pretty skeptical. Basically wondering how this was going to be any different than a Google Sheet. So far what I am most impressed with is the ability to link records across sheets and retain the relationships. So in the example of layoffs.fyi they have multiple locations that are impacted. Each of those locations show up as a pill… and stay linked to the same location record. So if California is a location, there can be a California record on another tab. In Google Sheets this would be some sort of vlookup nightmare with nothing maintaining integrity.
  
  Anyway I am pondering list ideas. So far I have life optimization resources, and quotes. Not sure if these make the cut. I am looking at 3 questions: 1) Will it inspire people to share, 2) will people bookmark it to come back, 3) does it have any way to make money for hosting and maybe more.