TDC was the original idea I started working on after quitting my last tech job. I thought I'd be able to run the engine with crowd funding rather than investment or freelancing, until there was enough leverage to get good investment terms and legitimacy to attract clients.
I've been following the same principles and making applications with 'old and boring' tech for some time now. I've made too many apps to remember them all, somewhere around 20 in part and a few in full. I got distracted documenting the human side of operations with Urban Camping Pro because it turns out there are times and places where it's possible and acceptable to use tech, and hidden costs like hardware failure that are hard to pay without the income engine running.
Every obstacle is a lesson though, I'm not complaining. This is what anyone who wants to get established in tech will go through, only harder because I'm already viewed as having had my chance and struck out. I've come to viscerally understand what it's like to be trapped below poverty where the word destitute unquestionably applies: too poor to even help oneself.
I don't mean to be pathologically independent or not reach out to people. But I have been this independent by necessity and my past friendships existed at least in part because I was desirable and beneficial to know, but now that I'm stuck on a desert island those conditions don't hold and I understand why nobody wants to deal with me. Despite whatever false accusations of violence and bigotry might have been made by my boss in 2015 which I thought was the source of so many people ghosting me, via a whisper campaign or similar. It's just less energy to not deal with people, despite my longing for connection at least weekly.
The tech I'm incorporating will continue to grow in power. The idea is to give an average person like myself as a teenager a ladder up into a constructive life like the one I built early on, that most people know me from. Know my former self, anyway. I'm superior to my past self in many ways, except the baggage around my image dominates. Pretending it doesn't exist seems like a failure, and I'm still processing how I actually failed. No feedback from the company or my friends = endless Internet research and meditation, solo. Only a couple friends have really talked to me directly about what happened in 2015... most of them gave extremely poor advice or were dismissive, and I stopped bringing it up as I started getting ghosted and assuming that gossip was happening (I know, ASS-U-n-ME).
Spiritual Warfare is happening however it shows up in the physical, I know that for sure. I think the intensity has dropped since I cut off my parents/relatives and accepted that cutting ties with almost everyone is needed. There's no way I can prove I'm not crazy or worthless without creating something. I'm floating in this existence as a retail worker and there are really few paths out for non-junior people who can buy some time with a Bachelor's or something.
I don't know how TDC will carry me forward but at the same time I keep increasing my own screen time on my own apps that I build. Eventually something should be useful to someone. I keep publishing and forgetting what I published and finding it years later and being impressed. Just need to work on the packaging. Just need to find some people with itches I can scratch. Definitely long past wanting to be the tech guy to some idea guy and give away 85% of my equity, no deluded about how much the tech co-founder deserves in the grand scheme of a business.
My circumstances leave me without an abundance of time to edit and make citations and otherwise edit my work, beyond broad stroke stream of consciousness writing that I deliver lately, which I guess also really hurts my image and lends credibility to the idea that I've gone crazy or faked my way to success or something else.
Like I've not talked to anyone receiving this email much in years. Lockdown/Pandemic is a whole thing that happened and made getting off the street even harder... to the point that I tried to stay with my alcoholic dad and he blew up our relationship (which under scrutiny was also perception/false memory far more than reality). Really entertaining how confident I was in 2018 that my team and I were about to gang up and make some waves, and then I ended up chronically homeless and absolutely stuck, writing about poverty.
Thanks for all the support over the years. I don't even know how to go about growing or mending relationships with people since I'm so used to getting nothing but radio silence and contempt when ignoring isn't an option. Most of my life was really positive and full of good people. I'm sure I've made excuses here and there about things but there's no way that is my temperament even a minority of the time. I'm not just bitter and making excuses for my failures out here, like I've legit stuck and the world legit has gone through fundamental changes that made it harder to get unstuck... and I'm still here, living a life where people can tell I don't belong down in the gutter but if you listen to the money it says "you might not be eating until pay day"--I'm not just not applying myself or distracted by drug addiction, I'm just .......wait for it .......there's a word for this: ..... I'm destitute or at best tolerating unacceptable behavior to be able to feed myself and save $100/mo for like 18 months to move into a cheap apartment in the middle of a corn field.
There goes that crazy person rambling again. I'm really not dumping on myself, I don't think this way about myself for real. But across 100s or 100s of people over all these years I believe that to be the average sentiment when I start trying to talk. Like people can't see me in a positive light or ascribe positive sentiment or intent to anything that comes out of my mouth. Again, not complaining, just observing.
So there we have it.... the written but not edited, one take no fake update on TinyDataCenter the company, not the code.
Thanks and happy new year,
Harlan