📙 #15 Accidentally Temporarily Successful
How I became one of Edelkrone's top collaborators, for one bright, terrible moment.
Sometimes I get asked if I sketch ideas on paper before starting a new project or begin directly in code.
The truth is that it always starts with a sketch, more often pages and pages of them. Although, as in the case of the photo above, one will sometimes be enough.
I'll then start thinking about how to turn the sketch into code. Most of my projects use a core of around seven techniques, and the challenge is how I'll arrange and order those fundamental building blocks to get the result I want this time. Finally, those thoughts will turn into notes dotted around the sketches about how each bit works.
When it comes time to write the code, I know exactly what I’ll do. At this point, the job of the code is to create my intended final output, and my job is to get the code to do that. Very little exploration of ideas happens at the coding point.
However, bugs will happen that create results I find interesting. Those will get tucked away in the ideas folder, which will, in turn, become more sketches, that may later become code again.
Working with code is my "happy place" I'm intimately familiar with the tools; there is very little thinking, just doing. I remember the frustration of trying to learn a new coding language, but that was years ago. I feel like I'm growing into my role as a happy, chill, bearded coding wizard.
I just have to be careful not to use it as an easy escape from all the other things I need to be doing. I can't code my way to getting the walls painted.
I accidentally earned $6,000.
For SEO purposes, I probably should have led with that rather than "Where do you get your ideas from?" but you know, fuck it.
It was time to make the April Profit/Loss video, so I checked all the money-arrives-here places. The last one I reviewed was PayPal, which unexpectedly had a few thousand pounds sitting in there 🤷♂️
As this suddenly made the potential profit/loss video about a million times more interesting, I took this as an opportunity to do two things.
One: order some more pens and have a bonus bagel for lunch 🥯
Two: upgrade the profit/loss video from a monthly extra to the prime Tuesday evening video slot. Thankfully, giving me a little more time to edit together the shambles that is my iDraw vs AxiDraw video that was supposed to go live this week. I swear what I was saying to the camera made sense when I said it, but looking at all the footage now, I'm in editor despair. I may just reshoot the whole thing 🎥🥲
I've put the details into a mercifully short 7-minute video (5½ mins on 1.25 speed), embedded below, probably.
The tl;dr version is this.
Edelkrone (maker of video stuff) gave me a code to use and an affiliate link as part of their new community thingy: https://edelkrone.com/pages/collabs
The link didn't work, but the code did, so I added it to the description of my YouTube videos. Where it promptly got scraped by those coupon code websites. So anyone searching for "Edelkrone money off coupon code" or thereabouts got sent to one of these many pages, that were now using my code.
It was enough for 28 people to get 10% off some fancy gear, 15% commission for me, totalling $6,000, and an email from the CEO saying, "Hey, about your code........"
Watch the video here:
And on the off-chance this newsletter now shows up in the search results for "Edelkrone money off code", here’s a code you can use in a none web-bot scraping way.
Staying in video world. Last week I released my remote pen plotter controller tool, a very lightweight wrapper for the command line tool that comes with the AxiDraw (so AxiDraw only)
It's appeared in enough videos that people started asking me about it. It's handy for people like me who want to be away from the machine when it starts and a) know when it will finish, b) get an alert when it finishes.
More info here: https://github.com/revdancatt/remote-plotting
Lastly, two more weeknotes videos if you want to follow along on how my weeks are going in a video diary kind of way.
I joke with the kids that I do this so when I die, there's enough footage of me to recreate my voice, way of talking and appearance to bolt it onto the front of an AI and chat with me about my time as a moderately successful artist.
2023 Q2 Week 3: Off the rails & website coding.
2023 Q2 Week 4: FALLiNGWATER, obstacle courses for pen plotters & new new studio?
In each newsletter, I should add a clear call to action somewhere around here, often listing all my social media links, but Substack makes it so damn awkward to copy and paste from one issue to another that I can never be arsed. So, on the vague off-chance, you have a Bluesky account, you could follow me there: https://staging.bsky.app/profile/revdancatt.com
Top tip: staging is a web-based view 😁 otherwise, search for "revdancatt".
Anyway, until next one adventure-cats!
Love you all,
Dan