Work/Life Update #2 – Free life upgrades
Plus a demo of a prototype + launching a new YouTube channel (Moved Show)
At 9:30am some time this week, I visited the Arbeitsagentur – the employment agency of the German government. I’d filed as unemployed since quitting my job, and I’m there to speak to an advisor. This is all mandatory if you want to make use of Arbeitlosengeld I (unemployment money).
The lady who is my advisor turns out to be really nice. Despite working in a bureaucratic institution where she doesn’t need to be nice, she is. I came with a shield and a club behind my back, but her care disarmed me, and I was as honest as I thought I should be with her. I didn’t say I wanted to start my own business yet, because it would throw out some valuable opportunities for me.
Like, I’d like to be paid to improve my German. Turns out, in Germany, while they pay up to 67% of your previous salary with the Arbeitslosengeld I scheme, they can also sponsor you to upgrade your German language skills up to B2 level.
So now I’m re-organising my solopreneurship timeline to fit in a few months of language learning. Since the government also sponsors upgrading for the unemployed, I might also attend an AI or Product bootcamp. I’m very excited by this! The last thing I said before I left my advisor’s office was, “Wow, Germany is awesome!” To which she replied, “Yes, Germany is awesome when it comes to giving support to those who need it.” Amen. A-freaking-men.
But if I’m honest, I’m also a little disappointed that I’ll likely have to push back my product launch. (Or maybe I could cut scope?)
So anyway folks, my week in solopreneurship is defined by keeping still to feel wind, carefully considering which direction I’d like to head, and hoisting the sail to catch the right wind. Hopeful that I’m headed in the right direction.
TrimScribe Build Log
Done 🚢 – working prototype where you can load a transcript, delete words or a series of words, and click ‘Render’ and obtain a downloadable audio file automatically cut from the original audio file based on transcript edits. (The first time I got this working, I smiled so widely that my lips cracked and started bleeding…)
Doing – refactoring my html+css+js prototype code into Next.js code, hosted on Vercel. (Thank you Bernd for the inspiration!)
Quick shout out: If you are a small video creator (even as a hobby), I’m confident TrimScribe can help save you a lot of time and not break the bank. Add yourself to the waitlist to gain access to the early release and special early bird promos HERE.
Moved YouTube Channel Log
I’m not actually sure if I shared this with you (my newsletter audience), but I’ve launched a YouTube channel that shares videos of people who moved abroad trying to live their best lives. Check it out on ▶️ YouTube!
Done – published 2 Shorts. One is the best performing in terms of views so far (1.1k views).
Doing – editing a new video interview with Karl, a Filipino startup founder living in Berlin. I’m 80% done, will go live next week!
#ParentLife
One of the hardest things about parenting I’m beginning to experience is how hard to push your child.
If your child is learning to play the ukulele, how much do you push her to practice in the evenings before bedtime, knowing she probably doesn’t want to do it? There is, after all, a ton of more interesting things to do.
Do you say, “Okay, let’s grab a chair and the ukulele and practice what we learned from John today”? And what do you say if she answers, “No, I don’t want to!”?
For me, either ways I bend, I’ll still feel a little guilty.
If I insist, sometimes it leads to a full-on struggle for a whole hour before she gets 5 minutes of real practice done. (The rest of the time is resistance.)
If I let it go, then it feels like we’ve lost an opportunity to build her resilience and work ethic, which doesn’t accumulate so much as it back-tracks previous days’ progress in establising an uncomfortable daily routine of deliberate practice.
#MarriageLife
I’ll just leave this image here for you to ponder alongside this thought from reading Daring Greatly by Brené Brown:
It’s a waste of time to evaluate your worthiness by the opinions of hte people in the stands. Those who love you and will be there regardless of the outcome are within arm’s reach. They’re in the arena with you.
#LivingAbroad
My wife went to Maastricht for a gig this week and we had a long-ish conversation when she came home about how much she liked that city. We like the Netherlands a lot and have toyed with the idea of moving there a few times this year.
Our conclusion is that the need to pick up an entirely new culture and language again is going to set us back a lot, and we’re not sure that’s worth it right now.
Sometimes we have to enjoy the beautiful things without having them.
#CodeCraft
This week I’ve learned to use AI tools better by not trying to achieve one-shot prompt perfection. Instead, I’ve been putting on my software engineer hat on again and prompting only after I’ve thought about the problem myself thoroughly.
This means not talking to Claude 4 or ChatGPT o3 to plan. It means planning yourself and asking Claude or ChatGPT to sanity check and cover holes. And when the plan seems solid enough, I’d prompt in small pieces myself, rather than pasting the whole plan for it to pace itself with the work to be done.
Some reading this would be thinking, well, that’s fighting the promise of the whole agentic AI movement right now, which is to pass instructions for agents to do the work asynchronously. To those people, I’d say you’re right. I’ve been getting better results at the moment letting AI assist me in tedium, not making it do my work for me, because I’ve spent more time finding and correcting problems that that has introduced than doing it myself with AI merely assisting with writing common boilerplate and logic.
Side note, I found the Cursor Memories feature quite useful. It’s like ChatGPT memory, where you talk to it and it sometimes updates its memory of your interaction for future reference. This now works in Cursor too.
Three to Steal
Read: Daring Greatly by Brené Brown
Use: carbon.now.sh - to make good-looking shareable code snippets (thanks Bernd)
Think: “Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out, and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter because once you are Real, you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” – the Velveteen Rabbit (1922 children’s book by Margery Williams)
Hit reply to tell me what you took away from this, send me feedback on this new weekly format, or just to say hi. I always reply.
✌🏻 Nick Ang