Thoughts and reflections from the past week or so from my own financial independence campaign.

*another 2 weeks… my bad.

Progress on my goals

Boat life

Nothing significant to report over this last fortnight. Lady SierraWhiskyMike and I have been running hot and the place looked like a bomb had hit it. Spent yesterday doing the myriad of small chores that we’d neglected in the hoped of tidying the place up a bit and making ourselves acceptable for civilisation.

Start-up work

We have been (very provisionally) greenlit by the regulator and now need to build up to launch.

This is one of the two reasons I’ve been so slow: I’ve been using my new Python knowledge to call APIs and – weirdly – to create my own monitoring API that’s going to partially power our minimum viable product at launch.

An API is basically a script (in my case, written in Python) that supplies information to other programs when that other program calls it and give the right passwords. There’s a bit more to it that that, but that’s the gist of it.

They’re easier to work with than I was expecting. Having done both, I’d say writing a legal contract is generally harder than making a Python script to call or become an API.

I’m enjoying the ride: every day is a learning day!

In the meantime, we ran an event on our island that showcased our capabilities as a team and it has already given us some promising leads. How example: I’m off Monday night to take an international entrepreneur to the pub and see if we can do anything with their business.

Busy, but I think we’re getting towards the “winning” part(!). I’m spending the next two weeks in building mode to get more of our infrastructure sorted.

My buddy with the legal work enquiries hasn’t gotten back to me, so I suspect that’s out. No big deal.

Distractions and detours

Stag do!

Went on a university mate’s stag do last weekend. We’re knocking on the door of 40 so it wasn’t the wildest of nights, but it was still good.

Great to catch up with people.

Partied a little too hard on the Friday, then did Zorb Football and a baseball simulator on the Saturday. Zorb Football is hard with a headache. Learning my lesson, I snuck off with the early leavers on the Saturday night for an incredibly smug Sunday morning.

Python coding

As said above, I’ve learned enough now to start messing with APIs and do useful things.

I’m still a little reliant on LLMs to check my coding, but the design of each script and function is me. LLMs are really good at spotting typos so it makes absolute sense to use them for that.

I still don’t do things like ask Claude or ChatGPT to do my coding from scratch. Well, front end maybe, but that’s because I don’t have any eye for design and can read HTML/CSS already in case I need to amend stuff by hand. The Python side? I take some advice, but I rarely use the code as provided unless it’s correcting an error I’ve made. I make a lot of typos, so that’s not a small number, but the changes are usually pretty modest.

I’m top of this: I’ve learned how to generate encryption keys with OpenSSL and use secrets managers to add security to my programs that might live on the internet.

Is this a long-term direction?

I thought about whether this might transfer to a digital nomad-style life, but I suspect probably not. People would much rather take a punt on Claude or ChatGPT than bring in a novice coder and I can’t really blame them for that.

Still, it’s fun, and maybe I can build a few things with it.

FIRE AI apps and calculators

It seems that not a day goes by that this blog doesn’t get some spam e-mail asking me:

“Dear Person, would you like to publish [irrelevant topic] article? Please reply so I can harvest your details for my spam database!”.

More recently, I’ve been getting a lot of traffic from people saying they’ve built the next AI app that will “replace spreadsheets for FIRE”.

I’m going to respond to these events quite bluntly:

  • I reviewed Topia as an exception, because the effort that went into developing that app was huge. Lots of research, lots of user testing, big focus on the user experience.
  • A big page of simple calculators on a messy dashboard is not solving any problem I have. To the extent I use a calculator, it’s a raw numbers thing and I already have That Calculator Site.
  • Tracking a modest number of accounts isn’t a pain point for me.
  • Big wet finger estimates are perfectly fine until I’m close to the FIRE number.
  • If I can’t see how your product makes money, I’m immediately suspicious of it.

I’m happy that you guys are excited to have something to vibe code, I really am, but if you’re creating something I wouldn’t use then I’m not going to promote it.

Screw it: I just might add a calculators page just to stop these e-mails coming in.

Non-FIRE goals

My guitar rock god quest (AKA learning to play)

My guitar teacher has injured his hand and was on force rest, so no guitar lessons for me.

I’d like to say I’ve been playing loads, buuuuut no. The vacuum has been taken up by the start-up businesses.

The lesson is: protect your time, or it’ll get taken for work.

Fitness

Been so lazy. Got gym rings in last week, but this week has flown by and while I’m showing a lot of steps on the pedometer I haven’t gotten myself to the gym like I really should have.

Final thoughts

All work and no play make SierraWhiskyMike a dull boy. I’m going to take Saturday and Sunday off, chill out and do some things that aren’t work or work-related for a bit.

Probably get back to my guitar again?

Weather is grim this weekend so no sailing planned.

However, despite all that, this really has been a big fortnight. Lots has happened, most of it has been really good and sets the scene for the weeks to come.

My financial independence campaign continues!