This was one of the most difficult and exciting years of my life, and it has passed incredibly quickly. For the benefit of both myself and the reader, I wanted to catalogue some of the adventures and lessons of the past year, and what that means for the year ahead.
A Year of Templates & Systems
A lot of this year has been focusing on the things that we repeat; taking meeting notes, writing SOWs, turning user stories into issues, and turning those things into tools and templates so we can focus on our creative work.
Some of that learning is being channeled into Coach Artie, our Studio AI Coach, who is being taught to do some of the repetitive tasks that AI is growing to be well-suited to perform.
Some of that is just creating old-fashioned templates and runbooks in Google Docs and duplicating each time we do something. I've also been developing a studio Nuxt Template that allows us to take an idea to a published site extremely quickly. In combination with our own AI assistant and GitHub Copilot, I am continually surprised at far we can go in short spans of time, and I want to keep pushing that and putting reps in.
Weekly Livestreaming Labs
I have been trying to be more disciplined about putting on weekly livestreams where
Struggles and Successes with Discord
Plans For The Year Ahead
I want to start building systems and patterns so that we can turn our ideas into reality much easier. This is everything from our AI studio assistant, to paperwork templates, project management, to deployment and operations.
A System For Cooperative Products
For work that isn't client-driven, we are building a system that is integrated with our time-tracking software Harvest and our payment processor Stripe. This will allow us to pay out any revenue from our collaborative creations equitably, taking a form similar to residuals in the music industry. All of this will be possible with as little cognitive and technical overhead possible, so we can focus on the important part; turning great ideas into reality.
One of the things that really inspired me to build my own studio was spending time at the local ceramics studio, where I can pay for a membership which gets me access not only to clay but also a huge variety of tools, forms, and patterns to mold it with. The walls are lined with all sorts of different tools for different situations that would be luxurious even for a potter who had spent a lifetime's income and time collecting.