I'm celebrating tonight what is a major upgrade to something I mentioned before. One of what will ultimately be many very practical online applications that follow what's called a hermetic code practice, which is, enhanced privacy and cyber security.
What I have to share today is that I have made some major advancements in this prototype application of basically a web application that is kind of a cross between a video game and a spreadsheet and a means of accounting because it's actually kind of like a construction project management bit of software where the business logic of calculating complex relationships between labor hours, logistics materials, costs, percentages per truck load, making sure you don't overload or underload and that you're efficient.
It will expose and show in real time with a pretty intricate dashboard of metrics that are running as you move in a vehicle that goes around and it picks up materials from the materials depot and then installs them on a grid site map which is scaled. It’s a few acres from from my aerial view. Looking down on several acres and every unit that you are able to install materials and design features on is about a ten by ten square foot area.
So it's a training tool I'm building so a sense it's a crude model, but because I have over the last several weeks, really been forced to what they call parameterize, all of these different metrics, to get all of these different calculations to make sense and to be realistic.
It's like they start out as hard coded pre sets, but the magic and the utility is gonna be in that as I continue to roll out features, then all of the preset parameters will be made into form fields and dials and and menus and whatnot, to where you will be able to punch in your own nuance of material type and the mileage that it takes to go from the job site to the location where you would be picking those up.
Or if you'd have them delivered, how that would look and how that would work.
All these permutations, they're all things that I have managed with my own independent contracting job sites that I have worked on as my own contractor.
What I realize is that the luxury that I had often working for crews, someone else did this.
They had office workers. They were using Quick Books and Excel and auto CAD and all kinds of other app. The technology stack of a modern landscape design level of permaculture design firm or crew, small business.
There's a lot of moving parts and I've been in positions where I had the luxury to not have to do a lot of that admin work, and I would just be deployed and sent out to go and show up and bust out the design and get better at actually reading the printed out blueprints to scale of the design and understand that science.
What I'm doing now, is not that sophisticated in the sense that it's like auto CAD.
It's more like a video game. Similar to the original Nintendo, the graphics are not crazy, 3D things flying at you.
But the point is, as a simulator, it teaches you the fundamentals of the logistics, the costs, what goes into building out a design.
Let's say, a perspective client, or someone who's permaculture curious, or someone who's just learning, or someone who like for me, I'd like to be teaching the permaculture design course using this tool where you could be sharing your screen saying this from the designer's manual.
I'm going to draw on the screen exactly to the specifications of what you're reading about on that page and that figure, I'm gonna install it on the screen, and you're gonna see how many labor hours it took, what the cost was for the installation, for the materials.
And those costs and materials, labor costs, mileage, gas costs, all that stuff can be adjusted to anywhere in the world.
I had to hard code all those starting points to have a proof of concept sort of minimal viable product kind of prototype out of the box for myself to play with them and to be put up online.
But again all those parameters are gonna be opened up for people to input on their own.
This is for me, a tool that I can use to actually spec out and price out my own projects for my own property.
That dry run mock up where I'm really considering, Okay, how, how much should I build out here in this zone? How much there and, and just maintain this design tool sandbox to always be iterating on new ideas without going out and actually spending money and realizing halfway through maybe I should have thought differently about it financially or functionally, design wise.
Now that I really built it out it kind of took on a mind of its own and I let the process just sort of possess me in a way.
I wanted to really catch up on a lot of web design front and back end, sort of full stack web development. In my more professional, sort of cubicle, corporate web site administration, website development, even graphic design days, that was a long time ago. I went way more into to actual permaculture installation and design.
But there was a time when I was writing code and building websites, but it was a totally different era, so I had a lot to catch up on.
The way that I'm doing it, I'm actually going back to some real basics and fundamentals that have been enhanced and perfected over the years.
But the fundamental style sheets, client side javascript, HTML, and avoiding the security vulnerabilities of the fancier, server side based applications that run on databases and that have a lot of attack surface.
I really need to make sure that I use this project almost like a school project. Like you would get a school project that would force you to apply everything that you learn from the course.
Now as I've moved along, and I realize how limitless the potential is. I’m limited by my solar power system. I have natural circadian rhythms and I don't exceed my solar battery bank and solar panel budget in order for me to push that very far.
It's probably for the best, because I'm the kind of person who will just get in the zone with coding and working on web stuff and graphic stuff, and I will just pull all nighters like crazy, and I should not be doing that at this age.
It would be really bad to be doing that.
Now, in my forties, the way I used to do it, very unhealthy habit of unlimited on grid electricity and unlimited dopamine of the twenties and thirties, and now I'm trying to find ways to get some of that dopamine flowing again and sustain that. As much as I love being out there digging ponds on the land, just digging itself, which is pretty much my work out.
For me at this stage of where the property is at. It's hard to keep very high morale.
So I'm glad to have this part of the day getting completely lost in this zone of total engagement.
It's just sprawling, hundreds and hundreds and thousands of lines of code.
Then going in there, and it's this math nightmare of like untangling Christmas lights and trying to figure out which bulb is out and try to replace it.
When you get this deep into this many layers of javascript functions, global scope and local scope functions, and how variables interact and cancel each other out. So many, not just moving parts, but just interconnected, entangled parts that are spread across a number of files and thousands and thousands of lines of code.
So this miracle of these tools called Integrated Development Environments. It’s like what a word processor is, but for writing code where you get your auto corrects and you get your all of your syntax help.
I can't thank enough those developers who have created this tooling because now I'm creating tooling for my tooling for my tooling, because there's if I change one aspect of one thing I really need, like a script that I already wrote so if I need to change the name of something, or if I need to add a new widget on this function in this game environment, then I need to build out like a hundred functions for it to perform like every other widget of its type.
There's so many ways to just fat finger the keyboard and put one character on one of these files that shouldn't be there, and then the whole thing breaks, and you don't know where it is or why, and there's only so much the IDE can do to cover you.
So I have to build tools, to build tools, to build tools, to make it dummy proof, and to build these rails for doing this code surgery
I've really done it this time in the sense that the scope and the dimensionality of all these features.
I really appreciate more than ever how much effort goes into things I take for granted.
And at the end of each day, I'm just like, I've got that thousand yard stare.
I'm almost dumbstruck. It feels like rock climbing or anything that consumes all of your attention. And you can't be distracted at all.
You better leave good notes in the code for what you did, because when you look at it, even a couple days later, you're like, this looks like an alien wrote this.
I have no idea what the hell is going on. It takes on a mind of its own. I'm excited about getting closer and closer to a level of fluency where you approach mastery. You just go by feeling and you don't have to think about it.
Then you just kind of know, without even linguistically putting it together, what you gotta do.
I'm also realizing that these days are getting hotter, and so the days are numbered of me being able to really put in full shifts.
I'm trying to get this thing really shippable as a as a toy to play with on the Internet for permaculture designers.
It is gonna be a trickle of updates as the temperature increases, and I have less and less hours a day that I can even be upright and adding anything to the code.
But it's at a point now where, by the time you'll be hearing this, the new upgrade, and you'll be able to start with a million dollar budget, and then knock yourself out.
The only rules are, don't run out of gas and don't go over budget.
I'll be excited to hear about what people playing with it, what features they'll request and what bugs come up.
We'll see what needs to be optimized. Certainly, I know that there are people who are way more advanced than I am with just knowing the tricks of the trade with coding.
They could look at my code and go, man, you could make this so much more lean.
It could be 10 % of the lines of code that would make it load faster, and it could be optimized in these ways.
So I'm looking forward to intelligent code critique and also less nerdy feedback of people just saying, like, oh, hey, I'd like to have this feature and whatnot.
But now it feels good to say that there are a lot of things in my life leading up to this chapter that I don't really wanna maintain.
I maybe I was proud of them at a time where they had a time and place in the world.
But this project is something that I feel like is healthy, wholesome, family friendly, something that can be perennial.
So it's a perennial project that unlike many other things before, whether it was bands I was in or just public personas I had, trying to evolve beyond them.
I'm not trying to be a slave to them. I'm not trying to be hung up on them.
But this is something I'm excited for, really, because I see how now I can continue to have this this renaissance of my inner child playing with building model railroad sets, just that level of engagement and excitement that really is a perennial state of mind.
These are open source technologies and all it takes is the time and effort to put in and I have all the tools to do it. I have all the time to do it.
It's just gonna be a continual, free, open source, ongoing journey.
It's kind of like laughable compared to more sophisticated technology stacks, who knows where it'll be as I progress.
When my brain comes back after the summer I will continue to be adding to this and I'm just in another state of mind, being thrilled and being excited about being able to take all of my practical experience. years and years and years on in the field of doing permaculture for real, just hands on and every level of that business administration and logistics and the design specifications and budgeting and client relations, all those nuts and bolts of permaculture business.
I don't have as much broad scale experience as I'd like. I have a lot of more urban, suburban, semi, rural, scale experience.
But what's cool about this platform is that I can continue to field in input from people using it to say, hey, can you add this feature that will really allow me to apply what was relevant to me at my scale, or my site, or my ecology.
My soil type, all the different parameters that I'm aware of, that I haven't had direct experience with. I'm ecologically literate enough and business literate and design literate enough to where I would continue to be able to add features and make this a useful tool.
I'm going online and realizing not only basic math that I'm having to relearn and figure out formulas.
But I'm finding that there are a lot of really good, free and very accessible contractor landscaping materials and labor calculators out there. That logic is there to be gleaned from.
Eventually, I will be able to with the appropriate licensing agreements or API calls, that there will be more behind the scenes, automated, what they call oracle integration, where, the gas price is already factored in for you.
Or things are updated in real time.
So if you go to this tool that I'm building, it'll be current, there'll be some automated features that are kept current, that don't require manual input or that aren't sort of deprecated or obsolete.
Because I put in figures and values that were the preset, hard coded values that maybe inflation takes off, prices, fuel prices.
So that'll be interesting. But I have this new passion, and it's bringing the best out of me.
I feel like this is the best, most enriching chapter of my life, as in a real world, as being a permaculture designer, working on my own land and building out the systems, within the limits of my of my budget and my physicality, resources, it's definitely the most rewarding and epic chapter of of my permaculture life and career as a designer.
The most fun feeling I'm having about this is the idea of having a permaculture client, which I've had many of, you have that awkwardness.
Some clients who would be like they just want the designer experience, and they don't really care what the bill looks like.
But a lot of people, most people, are trying to be thrifty and you wanna help them be thrifty and help them find ways to source materials, in a thrifty way and all that stuff.
The difference between being doing your own projects and working for clients is like, if it's your own project and your own time frame, you can wait for the craig's List score.
You can wait to be on the waiting list of the free dump truck loads of wood chip mulch from the arborist company wanting to save on gas and dump when they're in your area and they've got a full load and just be on their list.
However, if you're working for a client and they want the job done, then basically you are going around and you're paying industry standard, fair, top prices, or whatever, to just get the material sourced.
I'm kind of retired right now, but I am helping people, do permaculture projects remotely and remotely consulting.
So I love the idea of before you even talk to me about any of this, just go on the site and mock up footprint of your house, and then start playing around with building out what you would like to see that's your permaculture design with a ballpark estimate of how much labor it's gonna take, what the materials are gonna cost, what the logistics are gonna look like. Then we will be we're playing from the same sheet of music.
I love the idea of a client is being hey this is what I came up with on your mock up tool.
There's the budget, make it happen.
If I were doing the job, I've gotta do this within that budget, that's the estimate. That's the quote. So you have a graphical user interface video game quote instead of email or phone call you know or sort of a form that spits out a response, you get to play the game and you put in your budget, etc.
That's the most fun thing, the idea that of the relationship.
That value add to the client consultant designer relationship could make it so much more fun and so much less dramatic if you're giving them that tool.
I can't remember who to attribute this bit of wisdom to, but basically they said, you know, if you're a designer, no matter how skilled you are at drafting, whatever level of a genius you are with the different tools for landscape design, software, when it comes down to it, it’s good to have those skills and use them when you have to.
But when you're working with the client and your brainstorming and going back and forth on ideas, it’s best to actually just have these sort of bubble drawings, I think is what they call them, where it's just very broad stroke design concepts that you could sketch out and share with them so that you're not married to them.
You're not attached to them, and you don't do all this work, just trying to make this beautiful, perfect design for them to have them not like it, and then you fight them on it, because you're actually now sort of attached to this work of art you did.
In terms of relating and getting the client actually what they want and what they need, and not like you and your sort of self aggrandizement in the process, it’s better that you just do something that can be easily iterated on.
So to me, this is a great way to just play around with it for a little while, and you have something to start with.
Eventually there will be features to where you could save it, and maybe even do real time collaboration.
You'll save where you left off and resume later. And even better would be real time collaboration through a sort of streaming interface that would be really exciting.
It's really not that far out of reach, but I'm starting with very fundamental, very basic stuff, and we'll see where it goes from there.
I hope you enjoy it. And I hope that if you are new to permaculture, or you are a seasoned veteran, that you enjoy this tool and that you help me really make it more more fun and also more sophisticated and more precise and accurate with all of the technical minutia.
The ultimate goal would be there's grant foundation funding, and it's like somebody anywhere in the world can go on this tool, mock up what they would like to see, like in their village, mock it up on the interface, and then upload it and have that be funded to where they're gonna be backed to do it.