A couple of weeks ago, I quit my job.

I worked there for over two years. It was a small agency for internet content creators (a loaded term if ever there was one, but I’m not one to change the words people use), mostly YouTubers and podcasters of the “educational” variety. I think someone coined the term “Smarter YouTuber Mafia”, which internally was adopted wholeheartedly. I never really understood it.

It was a strange experience, working for a company that made its revenue from YouTube and other social media platforms. Maybe I’ll do a post-mortem on the whole thing in a future log. But right now, I want distance away from that culture. While they weren’t the most popular YouTubers, they certainly made enough revenue to support a very tiny Technology department, so I’m grateful for that.

But taking a peek behind the curtain has made me somewhat cynical about the industry as a whole.

The New Year

When the new year begins, I will be starting afresh. I’m hopeful, but I’m also cautious. Starting something new is something I’ve done only a handful of times in my professional career. You never know how these things will turn out, though previous experience has taught me to be skeptical.

I suppose my ambivalence stems from past experience. You hope you can go in and make an organization a better place than when you found it, but what often happens is you’re stuck and mired in the same old muck as the old place. Nothing can change because of things far outside your own control.

But we’ll see, I suppose.

Future Projects

While I don’t have any particular resolutions for the New Year, I do have projects I want some sort of forward movement on within the next year or so.

Things I want to develop in the future:

• My personal writing. I want to get back into writing, whether that be fiction or musing on something more technical. I have a few topics I want to cover here, which I hope will be useful or at the very least mildly entertaining.
• A new computer. With my laptop almost on its last legs, I’m planning on building my first computer in a long while.
• Newsletter as a service. I want a newsletter for my website, but I’ve grown wary of using 3rd party software, and I’d much rather own my own data.
• A podcast with my wife. Which may sound odd, given my comment above on YouTuber culture, but I like the idea of it anyhow.

The only thing preventing me from accomplishing these is inertia, a failing of mine I really need to work on…