The Month of February

Environment: Roadtripping across eastern Utah

C1x

My goal this month was to either build C1x into a more appealing app for all disc golfers, or to decide to kill development for it altogether. I went with the former, and determined that my best chance of increasing the app's popularity was going social.

I ultimately settled on a community feature which lets users compete against each other using the app in a variety of formats. C1x is built in a way that allows this even for users in different states or countries, something that I think makes a unique selling point. I finished and released the initial Deep Stats update at the start of the month (now live on iOS and Android) and got busy building this new feature out.

My ideas for this include a lot of things I have zero experience coding, including a much more powerful backend and the ability for user of my app to communicate with each other. Thankfully, AI has become quite magical in this area, and what would have taken me 3-5 months to build has instead taken only a couple of weeks.

At the time of writing, the basics of this social feature work. I'm trying to be more entrepreneurial in my approach, so I've identified a couple of target customers who I think this feature solves a specific problem for. My goal is to continue working for another 1-2 weeks to get this feature user-ready (though still in an alpha state), and then release and pitch the update to those customers to see if I've got something. If I do, then development continues and I start to ramp up marketing efforts.

I made quite a bit of progress on the feature this month (over 10k lines of code), and I'm quite excited for its potential. I'm also proud of the Deep Stats update, but it definitely serves a niche audience. Hopefully by this time next month the new feature (name TBD) will be growing out in the wild.

Habits

I decided last month to plan some lifestyle changes, and this was my first month of actually implementing them. I cut back on coffee, went from 0.5 workouts a day to 3, started doing a handful of mobility exercises and stretching daily, and incorporated a number of other productive habits. I've not been in the best of shape and have dealt with pretty constant joint/back pain/tightness for the past couple of years, and I am quite ready to be done with both of those.

I don't quite look like the statue of David yet, but I can say that my back tightness is essentially gone. I've played a handful of disc golf rounds over the past few weeks, and it feels like I'm throwing with a new body. Pretty exciting.

No plans of slowing down this month, though I will tweak some of my exercises now that I've had a month to figure out what's working and what isn't. My goal is to once again reach a point where I can confidently say I'm in good shape, and maybe lose a few pounds in the process.

Disc Golf

With a new back comes new ranges of movement, and I haven't quite figured out how to harness that yet. As I mentioned above, it has felt absolutely incredible throwing without stiffness, though I have still been far behind my usual quota for disc golf rounds. I used to play 4-5 times per week but for the past few months it's only been 1-ish round per week, if that. The solo rounds just haven't been quite as fun for me lately, but I've got some ideas to mix it up.

I did play in a couple of tournaments this past month - I won one but played pretty terribly in the other. Not ideal, but I'll take the 50% win rate. Daily putting practice has been one of my new habits, and I think it will pay dividends in the long term.

Project Management

I'm still working part-time as a project manager with SPARC Health alongside my day job in construction management. This has been a great learning experience and will continue to be over the coming months. I'm enjoying the ability to claim responsibility over different projects that comes with working for a startup, and am hopeful that this will continue growing into a position that provides unique challenges to pursue.

It's also allowed me to attend a couple of interesting conferences and meet interesting people - at a minimum I'll leave knowing more things and people than I did when I started. I also established my own LLC with the goal of eventually providing my own consulting services in a similar capacity to what I'm providing to SPARC Health. We'll see if that proves a useful thing to have.

Other

I still have my usual hobbies and projects outside of the above, which include writing for Substack, chess lessons, and rec basketball and volleyball. I turned my entire arm purple after a day of snowboarding, got deposed, got a bit better at playing the guitar, sold some of my disc golf collection, and booked travel for later in the year.

Not much else this month, but it feels like things are moving in a good direction.

Onward,

Dylan