A mile wide

Two years ago almost to the day, I signed the final documents to sell Progression. It had been a tough year of hurry up and wait, keeping the business running (and even landing and onboarding our biggest customers) while running a parallel workstream to find it a new home.

Somehow Neil and I managed to negotiate a 4 month earn-out - unheard of typically with this kind of deal - but that work took me to January. Toy Software Ltd was originally born as a necessity, I needed a UK limited company to receive part of the proceeds as well as invoice our buyer.

But I was also craving exploration. My mind has always worked overtime and I have an intense bias to action so in naming my company ‘Toy’ I envisaged a vehicle to build in all directions with wild abandon.

And for the following 18 months, it was just that. Especially as coding models matured, I found myself building and building — both ideas and real software — with real urgency, in doing so racking up over 2700 github contributions in the year to writing this.

shippin’

In the back of my head I thought Toy might even be something I want to commit to long term. A product studio, small team, a boutique creative output I could call my own.

However I’ve felt myself coming out of this phase for the last month or two. Going an inch deep and a mile wide is great fun for a while, but it also amplifies some of my weaknesses — shiny object syndrome and an activator personality type means none of my personal projects have made it past month three.

Except one. ooda started capturing my attention (in a different form) when I was one of the finalists of a hackathon back in February. It was a canvas based design tool, then it was VMs and sandboxes for designers to design with code collaboratively. Both invalidated but the core didn’t go away.

I’ll write more about it at some point, but I think it has legs. Enough that it makes no sense for there to be a layer between me and it.

So toy.studio no longer makes sense as a vehicle for projects — I don’t anticipate there being a lot more ‘new’ work. Instead I’m folding all Toy projects into a projects section here.

This frees up mental space for me to focus on one product of my own, plus client work through Near Future and my own practice.

Simpler feels better right now.