September went by much faster than I realised. While not as emotionally intense and high as August, I did end up doing quite a bit when I scrolled through my logs on Makerlog. It’s one of those months where I did more than I realised, but didn’t give myself enough credit and encouragement for it. Thankfully I do monthly wrap-ups!

Sustain and take it higher

• Daily hour of code continues to be the highlight. I really dug deep this month with Vue and Rails. Had loads of fun making tiny tools on Carrd using Vue, like a Google Sheet as database open startup page; playing with GSAP animations to make an accordion drop-downs that drop with an animated bounce; and marvelling at localStorage through to-do list mini-apps. For the first time, I was stumped for days on an issue integrating my very first Rails API with my Vue app. My first taste of coder madness. 
• Realising my kid-in-a-candy-store moment with coding and Codepen. This felt like striking gold, because I don’t get that feeling of deep satisfaction and excitement often in my career, and now there’s one for the taking anytime. Discovered Glitch, Tailwind
• Continued with my tech for good volunteering, and helped a volunteer initiative called Call Home to launch their marketing landing page. I really enjoy doing this work, and foresee myself doing more. I’m considering launching a tech for good patronage on Buy Me A Coffee to pay for domains and servers for more such work! 
• Brought Keto List to the next stage - more monetization hacks. Added CTAs for coffees on every blog post, and added new ad products, and it worked! This month was a fruitful month for Keto List, with revenue of $585. Probably my highest ever so far for this hobby project!
• This month was a month of many firsts! Money woes got a bit of a breather when I got a $4k+ for my first ever Zoom speaking engagement for Oct. Popped my Stack Overflow cherry and posted my first ever question there – grateful I didn’t get slammed by the elites, and I ended up answering my own question! Bought my first ever Facebook ad for Grant Hunt chatbot, as part of the grant money I secured. So much to learn about how to run ads and optimise that pot of money! My proudest moment near the end of Sept was when I got my first monthly subscription patron member for my tech for good patronage! Just deeply grateful and excited that anyone would want to give me money to do such work.

Start anew

• Fitness was dismal as per previous months, but at least I found a way to steal time by optimising the mundane - I ended up doing 3 sets of short exercises (pushups, planks, squats) over a day. Not done runs yet, still yet to find a window where it works with baby care. I wish to renew my runs, somehow!
• Sleep is worse, and I’m sleeping later than the intended 11.30pm. Sleep really is the base foundation for what makes a great month from an okay month, and being disciplined and protective about my sleep is something I need to renew.

Stop - stuff I should stop doing

• Got hacked on my Wordpress sites again this month. It’s such a pain in the ass, and such an unproductive use of my time. I should really stop using Wordpress and migrate my sites to JAMstack or to static. [#fuckwordpress](#fuckwordpress)
• Phone died for good, and had an accidental digital detox which felt good and learned some surprising things about what I really need my phone for. I should stop being tied to my phone so much and do more intentional detoxes more frequently.

Onward to October!