One of the things I love about companies like Automattic1 are statements like the Automattic Creed. And one of the things in their creed is the statement that “given time, there is no problem that’s insurmountable”. I genuinely like this idea. As someone who fought IRCC for years and eventually won permanent resident status, I believe that given enough time (and your mental health2), there truly is no problem that is insurmountable.
More details from Automattic
And of course, Automattic themselves had more to say on that line.
The key here is “given time.” Much of the work that we do is hard. It’s easier to put everyone in the same database. It’s easier to put everyone on the same domain, and you look much better on comScore rather than being dark matter. Open source eventually dominates every market it enters, but sometimes “eventually” can take a while. For online publishing and content management systems, WordPress helped it happen quickly.3 “Linux on the desktop”4 is perpetually a few years away.
We have to be comfortable swimming upstream, with most of the world considering us wrong for long periods of time. This is uncomfortable. Sometimes it means we’ll be ostracized. More often people, “Silicon Valley,” or the market will consider us parochial, unambitious, or just plain stupid. They’ll be right unless our success proves differently.
But, as someone who has been trying to lose weight and finish transition in the last twenty years, I know that some problems require more time to solve. In fact, getting permanent resident status has actually considerably advanced the goal of finishing transition. After all, I do live in the Territory with the best gender affirming care coverage in Canada.
Further, I think losing weight is the wrong metric, especially given that burning fat is much harder to guarantee by your own actions. All the dieting and exercising in the world can’t solve for a shitty metabolism. But, one thing I can do is focus on building muscle instead. Building muscle is easier. All I need is protein in + work to build muscle. Also, the number on the scale means fuck all to me. I just want to look good naked.
On swimming upstream
But yes, swimming upstream is not the most popular idea. Hell, my swimming upstream attracted the ire and abuse of my soon-to-be-ex-husband. And no, I’m not just talking about him scoffing at the idea of developing passive income given the insecurity with traditional employment. I’m also talking about how he would chew me out for not being able to find a job in Alberta, something I’ve always had trouble with. A job search that was fruitless for over a year only ended because I expanded my job search to the Yukon after learning about their gender affirming care coverage. But this would have been mitigated had I resisted my husband’s bad advice.
You see, my husband had a lot of limiting beliefs. Probably still does but I don’t talk to him anymore, so I couldn’t get a pulse on that. This caused him to start some projects with immense passion but then let them fall by the wayside. An example of this is his blog about Alberta politics, Bertatics. I encouraged him and for a couple of months, he sounded like he was fired up. But when it came to actually doing the work? He couldn’t deliver. He only made one post back at the beginning of 2024.
… In fact, writing this now, it reminds me of why it is so critical that I should finish editing Project Ouzel so I can start working on other projects without neglecting the ones closest to fruition. Because while the author’s path is a harder, longer path to profitability, I feel like it is more sustainable in the long term than traditional employment could ever be. But what do I know? I just have 22 years of experience on the matter. I’ve had some years where I made six figures as a web developer and was getting interviews with Mozilla and Automattic, others where I was on social assistance.
Sometimes, experience says swimming upstream is the only thing that makes sense.
- Automattic is the company that created WordPress.com, the SaaS version of WordPress, along with a bunch of other assorted tools. [↩]
- Yeah, I wound up unknowingly sacrificing my mental health to obtain permanent resident status. Coercive control is a bitch. [↩]
- Hell yeah, I was there for this, back in the olden days when “installing a WordPress plugin” meant copying PHP code from random sites on the Internet and pasting it somewhere in your code. It’s amazing that more WordPress sites didn’t get bricked back then. [↩]
- I think the Linux on the desktop is getting a lot of support from the actions of both the Trump Administration and Microsoft/Apple. There are some people for whom the death of Rosetta 2 will not be a deal breaker. Just like there are some people for whom the death of 32-bit support in Mac OS X was not a deal breaker. Or the death of PowerPC support was not a deal breaker. Not to mention the fact that Windows 11 is simply a hot mess and Microsoft broke a lot of trust with users. [↩]