GHDR Report 0909: Small Stories for Small Steps

⊕ show captionAbout the Photo // This is a screenshot of the new Portfolio Page here on dsriseah.com. I created it a job application, my first in over ten years, to try something new.

Happy September Groundhoug Day Resolutions Day! To quickly recap, last month I downgraded from THE SHIP to THE SHOP as my immediate aspirational scope. I’d say it’s been going better simply because it’s a lot easier to feel my progress is meaningful when compared to the modest goals of setting up a shop. The Ship, by comparison, spanned an entire universe of possibility.

Long Term Projects

I’ve also been measuring my progress against the three showcase projects I’ve mentioned before. I’m working on these long-term projects:

• Deno WebApp Platform - Sri’s software playground, supporting my programming credibility goals.
• Sri’s Digital PKMS - The system I use to publish this website and its notes, supporting my publishing goals.
• Web Revival Group - A collective like-minded writers and designers on the internet, energizing me with human interaction.

Each of these projects is a foundation to build upon. For example, the Deno WebApp PlatformThe public repo is at codeberg.org/dsriseah/deno-apptest distills my experience with Node.js into an opinionated platform for writing realtime interactive applications. I have the server side down fairly well, but ironically my strength as an interactive designer has languished. It’s going to take months, if not years, to build my front-end interactive side back to where it was 15 years ago, but I think it’s well worth doing.

Staying Amused

To keep myself from becoming frustrated, I’ve been writing down my progress as Fanciful Stories in the new Adventures/Stories section of the site. I’ve been trying to find a new writing voice that cozily conveys my values with a warm emotional tone.

As I mentioned before, I am also writing as if I was a cat, notably a “magical adventure cat” that hasn’t identified itself as such. The reason for the change in voice is because my past writing tends to be pretty denseLike this behemoth for Groundhog Day Resolutions June 2026 and I think this creates too much of a barrier to casual readers. In my most recent posts, I’ve focused more on the emotional tone in the main body and pushing technicalities to the margins, which helps. But I find writing as if I were a magical cat far more entertaining. Let’s see where the hell it goes!

The Bigger Directive

Both showcase projects and stories are a manifestion of my overall directive to:

New Projects and Career Pivots

There have been a couple of interesting side projects in this past month as well!

• I made a Graphic Design BasicsView Graphics Design Basics 1 curriculum (PDF). course for my sister. It’s based on my own digital graphic design coursework from ages ago, adapted from Adobe Illusteator for Affinity Designer.
• I also am applying for a job that I hadn’t considered before as an experimental pivot from the technology- and design-heavy work I’ve done before. A community-facing role might give me what I crave: the opportunity to talk to people about what they’re doing and provide them with resources to help them outI’d been wondering how to repackage that so I was actually solving human problems first in a more community-facing role. I tend to end up in this role anyway by nature, such as running DS|CAFE to playing support roles in MMORPGs.This is, after all, a theme of my own websites and productivity tools..
• Related to the job application was the need to update my resume and portfolio. This took over a week to do, but now I have a new linkpage that points to a new portfolio section. While it’s still somewhat rough around the edges, it’s a significant accomplishment.

Increasing Velocity!

I would like to return to making and sharing things every day. I’ve done a few challenge months before (see right sidebar) so I know I can do it and that it feels very fulfilling.

There are a few changes I’m making to this push:

• I want to pace it through the Stories section. The past challenges were documented as status reports, but these were not cozy the way I want them to be now.
• I want to be sillier about it, telling the daily progress as a Cat that’s trying to build community of scraps of knowledge. This is not only to keep me amused, but to practice different ways to write.
• By writing frequently, the stories tend to be shorter. This lowers the effort of rereading.
• By writing entries as a kind of serialized story, I maintain a sense of continuity in what I’m doing.

What I’m not sure about is whether anyone else really cares to read a stories where I pretend to be a cat doing things, but that doesn’t matter. Just writing about what I’m doing to share something every day is a good directive; by making things and putting them into the world, change tends to follow. Even if you don’t know what that change is going to be.

In summary, my directive looks like this:

I think it is funny, as cats are inherently funny to me. I expect that by doing something every day that I’ll make progress on those main projects to steadily build my credibility in areas of software, information management, and community building. But also there are other side activities like:

• Making new Productivity Forms!
• Talking to People about their Challenges!
• Condensing Knowledge and Sharing Them!
• Finding paying freelance gigs

These are all actitivies that make use of my three long-term projects in one or more ways, so this means that I’m not wasting effort. I am being pretty efficient in relating all the moving parts of my endeavors together. I just need to maintain my good humor and motivation. Hence, pretending I’m a magical adventure cat writing a story that people might actually read. And a Cat that does something every day for a month creates an actual body of work. That’s totally credible!

So that’s the plan for the month! Thanks for reading! See you again on October 10!

INDEX of GHDR 2026 POSTS