Brad Salomons

Tag: projects

  • hammer meet nail

    Creativity is sometimes, to borrow a turn of phrase, a hammer looking for a nail.

    Inside every creative soul there can be this latent urge to make something, anything, and despite the tools sitting on shelves or the technology idling on the desk, all of it patiently waiting for inspiration to strike, the creative hammer can sometimes be lacking a nail to strike.

    Motivation without a project to constuct.

    That’s not to say there isn’t always something worth pounding away at, a loose fence board or a wobbly bench that needs a few good thwacks, but constucting something brand new, whole cloth, fresh and crisp and exciting—therein life can sometimes leave the creative soul wanting for such inspiration.

    Thus leaves the poor sap with a perfectly good hammer in his hand to walk from place to place, examining every nook and cranny of his own backyard for a bit of mending to be done or maintenance upon which to direct his energy. He may even fall into the trap of picking through a pile of scrap wood and with a bag of nails in hand feel as though there is something worth constructing from the leftover bits of other projects.

    And sure, interesting artifacts may tumble out of such efforts. It is more soothing for the creative soul, however, to have a blueprint, even if it exists only in his mind, with a fresh purpose and a meaningful objective, to build something out of purposely acquired supply and to create with intent.

  • coder thoughts

    Coding is an iterative space in which I live.

    I build something that some would call a minimum viable product. It is little more than a toy that does something simple and basic and imperfect, yet it is functional. Once that utility reaches a certain point it is not unheard of for me to abandon such projects out of boredom or lack of direction, but on occasion the iterative mind steps in.

    I will think of this minimum viable product that with a few more hours of work it can perhaps do more things that would build off the simplicity and basic functionality. So I write more code and launch more tweaks. 

    This goes on and on in waves, sometimes for years, and after a long while composed of stints of development, revising, improving, removing, and refining I find myself with something that is no longer a minimum viable product, but rather something much more complex and interesting.

    This iterative thought about a wouldn’t-it-be-neat-if project has manifested by stepwise effort into a small but effective little code base that moves data around and renders web pages and sends emails and validates users and whatever other clever little algorithmic functionality that I have been poking away at making work.

    Sure, I could have sat down and mapped out a project in its entirety and worked tirelessly to make it all at once, but there is something organic and curious about my method, curious about this space in which I choose to call myself a coder.

  • critical mass

    After a year of pecking away at this thing I’ve learned to think of as a “writing life” I’ve found that I’ve kinda reached a critical mass of projects.

    True. Part of me thought I would have created something worthy of publication by now, but rather that has not been the case. For example, I have a written 80% of a novel. I have penned about thirty scripts for yet-unrecorded podcast episodes. I have typed out a couple of completed short stories that need editing and the bones of at least a dozen more that need focus. My word processor files are now filled with so many personal essays on such a wide range of topics and in such a broad state of completion that I can barely keep track save for just to open one that looks interesting and polish, tweak, add, or prune.

    And. It would be fair to say that I have typed a quarter of a million words in the last year. Sure, I’ve not but published a whole number percentage of those but they exist and they are not without value. Hardly.

    In fact, as I stated, I’m at something of a critical mass. I have such a broad number of great little projects in progress that on any given day I can wake up and type a few hundred words here or few hundred words there and make progress on any one of those projects. Like, if I’m so inclined I can write another chapter in my novel, scope out a few more pages of that comic script I’ve been working on, or edit one of my essays for just a hint more of clarity.

    None of this is wasted effort. It’s all incrementally building and growing and progressing.

    It all just adds bit by bit, drip by drab, onto the whole of my collected efforts.

    And while I may sometimes feel a little discouraged by the lack of publication-readiness of most of it, I am deeply encouraged that so much of it is slowly and steadily moving with momemtum towards that publish-ready state at some point in the future. Maybe even the near future.

  • dabbling

    I’ve been thinking a lot this week about the idea of dabbling.

    There is value in the trying.

    What is failure, after all?

    By my reckoing failure doesn’t necessarily need to be a binary outcome.  

    I mean, just because you’re not a raging success at something doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth trying, does it?  You can fail a little bit and succeed a little bit and maybe at the end of the day you learned a little bit about a new thing, a little bit about yourself and a little bit about the universe.

    Me? I try a lot of things and I’m not necessarily a raging success at any of them.

    So I use the word “failed” in a pretty casual way that isn’t neccessarily meant as a negative. It tried it. I learned something. I moved on. And maybe, yeah, I still dabble in that thing, or own the equipment, or even just think about it from time to time. It was a flop in terms of changing the way I live my day to day life, but now some time later, after the dust has cleared from the effort, it’s all worth reflecting on and definitely not a waste of time or effort for the attempt.

    Oh, sure. There is also value in persistence. There is value in deep learning on a topic, value in practicing for years at one thing and becoming the absolute best at it, honing a craft for those apocryphal ten thousand hours so that you stop being a dabbler or an amature, and instead become something we vaguly define as an expert. And yeah, expertise is valuable. 

    But then maybe some of us are destined to go broad, to not become experts in a singlular field, but rather experts in the universe, prolific tryers of anything once, twice, or until we get bored and try something else.

  • audio drama

    In 2001, having recently finished university and found my first “real job” I packed up and moved to the west coast of Canada to a city called Vancouver.

    I had no car. I had few friends. I had a lot of free time. And I had the hulking desktop computer that had seen me through my school work.  

    So I wrote a blog. It was a new toy, a new platform, and no expectations. A way to communicate to the world, to my friends back in Alberta, and to chronicle this life I was living.

    I’ve posted millions of words online since I penned the first journal entry into the early blogosphere back in 2001, scattered across countless platforms and dozens of websites with various lifespans.  I have wrung the dish cloth of the printed word so throughly that is sometimes seems not but a drop is left in it to squeeze out.

    Of course, there always is more to write. More to type. More to post.  These words are the very example of that, but I write like I breath these days, it’s just what I do every single day.

    The spark of creativity that I once felt in creating new and exciting websites has become just another buzz in the background of my creative life, rarely the end result and often more of a necessary foundation to the rest of it.

    Enter audio.

    I have been a consumer of audio for decades, from music to audiobooks to podcasts to soundtracks. I listen therefore I am.

    Yet, I have had so little experience recording, producing and sharing audio that on a graph comparing my written word output to my audio file output, the latter would likely not even register as anything more than an approximation error.

    In 2024 I decided to remedy that.

    I bought a digital audio field recorder, a tool with which I can step away from the keyboard and focus on the sounds of the world and my own spoken voice.  I bought a podcasting microphone. And I have come up with multiple plans for multiple podcasts.

    Like everyone I cringe at the sound of my own voice coming through my headphones as I’m editing, but after hours and hours of recording, retakes, production, mixing, and generally just playing around I sort of feel the same way I felt back in 2001: like a guy with a new toy, a new platform and no expectations.  A new way to communicate and chronicle about this creative life I’m living.

    And who knows, maybe in ten or twenty years, recording audio will be just as much a part of my daily routine as writing.  You can check out my podcasting at squwetchy.art/podcasts