Summer
For some people it's the beach, for some people it's the mountains, but for me the best part of summer is the fruit. I get irrationally excited about finding and harvesting fruit.
You might not think of Alberta as the best fruit growing region on the planet but it is. “But Brendan!”, you might interject, BC has the Okanagan and it's bountiful peaches and other tree fruit. California grows literally everything. France is the worlds epicenter for red grapes.
But no! Alberta and the rest of the Canadian prairie provinces are the world's largest cultivators of the world's best fruit: the saskatoon! You know it's the best fruit because we have the largest city in the world that is named as a fruit in Saskatchewan; Saskatoon with a population of 352,000. (Tangier which is larger gave its name to the tangerine instead of taking its name from the fruit).
For those of you who have never tried one, a saskatoon tastes like no other fruit, it is a smallish berry that kind of looks like a blueberry but it grows on a bush that grows up to 5m tall (if you can call a 5m tall tree a bush!). The taste is a tangy, nutty sweetness with differences between varieties.
The best part of it though is the visceral bliss of pulling down a branch, grabbing a bunch of saskatoons that are balloons ready to pop, having them burst in my hands staining them, and then throwing them into my mouth to savour their juicy flesh.
Nordegg to Rocky Mountain House
The heights of the Rockies towered over us as we paddled down the North Saskatchewan before throwing us (literally, we swamped three canoes) through “The Gap” to the foothills. There, we camped along Devil’s Elbow, a 250m wave train. We decided to run it. The first was a roaring success. The second canoe, my canoe, wasn’t so lucky. We smashed into the biggest rapid straight on, took on half a boat of water and then decided we could paddle through the rest of the waves. Well, we kept paddling, just without a canoe...
Building software businesses
There are a few non-technical entrepreneurs that have started stitching together various vibecoding tools, open-source software and workflow builders (like zapier and n8n) into real businesses. But that's not accessible to all the people that could be building phenomenal businesses or solving problems in their existing businesses. Every company will soon be a software company.
There is so much repetitive work that people do as part of their everyday jobs that they should be able to automate. That work is not unique to them, other people in that industry and they have deep expertise in their industry; professionals know the pain points and have great networks that they could sell to. They would be excellent entrepreneurs.
It shouldn't take a rocket surgeon to scrape some data that someone needs every week. Or have a form that validates the entry and routes users to the right place. Or have a form that must be submitted (by law!) to be first screened by an AI system to decrease the time to first feedback for a respondent or to triage high-risk cases for regulatory compliance.
But the reaction of most people isn't: Is there a better way to do this? It's to push through and follow the process.
Oftentimes the answer is software, that's why Software as a Service has powered the growth of the technology industry for the past 15 years. I want there to be more software in the world and I want more people to make tools that lets everyday people build software.
Success
I find it so seductive to use other people’s benchmarks for what I define as success.
Do I have a nice house? Am I making more money that other people (this is embarrassing, but it is shocking how much time I’ve spent looking at income percentiles for various places) Do people around me understand and value what I am doing? Is my job high status? Do my peers view me as high status? As competent?
My aunt and uncle were talking about what convinced them to get a dog and it was my cousin saying: “seven smiles a day”. What my cousin meant by this is that getting a dog will put a smile on your face an extra seven times every day.
I have never made a decision by how many smiles I would earn from it. That’s not how adults talk about a successful outcome. It’s how kids do. Maybe the kids are right.
I’m still working out what it means to live my life to the fullest with my eyes open to the fact that there a trade-offs to what I can possibly pursue and nuances to what success feels like that will be difficult if not impossible to articulate.
Love
My nephew was born, I love him.
Media
The electric slide is a history of electrical exponential technologies: microcontrollers, power electronics and batteries. It really drives home the weirdness of how these unlock new applications that were not possible before and how these applications (like drones) seemingly come out of nowhere.
The fundamental observation is that technologies compound in a similar way to compound interest. The improvement in performance of a technology leads to a new base from which other technologies can build off of and also cross-polinates other inventions. That base continually grows and those results are multiplicative instead of additive leading to crazy growth curves instead of linear increases.
Blackberry Eating - Galway Kinney
I felt compelled to buy a poetry book late last year and I thumbed through a few but I was sucked into Galway Kinney’s Collected Poems. I opened the book to his poem First Day of the Future sucked me in and I have continued to be enthralled by his writing.
Blackberry Eating one is my favourite of his and encapsulates how I feel about Saskatoon picking. (Blackberries are also fantastic)
I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths and squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.
At Folsom Prison - Johnny Cash
Just a fantastic live album, the best is 25 minutes to go but you should listen end to end. It's both hilarious and gut wrenching to deeply humanize the people that he is performing for.
The laughter helps me empathize with the prisoners whose lives are no longer theirs. I could've been born into a situation whose default path led to that. I'm grateful I was not, but those prisoners weren't so lucky. I think it's worth thinking as those people as humans that deserve love, care and compassion.
Video
I love the movement of the clouds as the wonder tumbles below me. The shadows the clouds cast over the lake and the glacier give a delicious depth to the scene.
Request
I’m curious what you think of living a successful life. How do you (or do you at all) define success in your life? Are you currently succeeding? How did you decide that was what success was for you?
What a thought provoking question to ask! Success is defined in so many different ways, as uniques as each individual, I suppose. I define it for myself as making a positive difference in the world. Connection brings me joy, and seeing others live their own versions creates a sense of bliss in my soul.