It’s amazing how quickly a computer can sum up our existence. When I ask Chat GPT to explain writer’s block it doesn’t even blink before telling me exactly what’s wrong. On a scale of 1 to 5, I have been all of these things lately. This post is an attempt to break through this drought. I’m really not sure what I’m here to write about, but I’ll be posting whatever happens to come out.

This year has been a wild ride already. Just this year XYZ Digital has launched 3 products (kaizen.place, Engram, and SafeCycle) and a fourth EventFare is powering an interactive map for the Steve McQueen Car Show in a couple weeks. As if that wasn’t enough, we’ve teamed up with Hoozin just this week.

Kaizen

We hosted a launch party last week in Los Angeles where Byram released some works in progress for his next album and we talked about how Kaizen started and where it came from. I’ve been delaying sharing this video because I can’t decide if I should cut it up, where to upload it, or if it’s even worth your time. Thankfully I can embed a Google Drive link, because I almost bailed out of adding it if it was going to be any more difficult than that.

The coolest part of our launch? Ryan Hoover, the founder of ProductHunt tweeted about us!

Engram

If you’ve followed me at all, this project has pretty much been reborn. It is no longer a notes application and is instead a web application deployment system. The original goal of helping teach people to program remains. If you are interested at all, please find my email at the bottom of this page and shoot me an email. I will follow up and you can learn to code no matter who you are.

We’ve entered the New Ventures BC Competition and we’ll see where things go from here. This competition has pushed me to focus more on the business and marketing aspects of software than I have ever done. It has been challenging, excited, and boring all at the same time. We are still pretty deep in the research and development phase, but I’m looking forward to sharing this more and more soon.

SafeCycle

Last Summer, a couple colleagues and I participated in the C3Tech Cycling Hackathon and won the first place prize for our “nogo” technology to enable safer and more comfortable cycling routes.

This project has since grown it’s own wings and is currently being piloted in Windsor, Ontario.

EventFare - Steve McQueen Car Show

Last Spring I was coerced (I mean politely asked) to take my dad’s place as photographer for the 2022 Steve McQueen Rally. As one does, I got to talking with the organizers about how some kind of software could be made to improve the experience for everyone. It’s not perfect, nor is it fully complete, but I will be at the show to get a better sense of how it’s working and what other needs the event has.

Hoozin

This one is still too early to say much about. I’m excited to get back into mobile app development with Flutter. If the experience goes well I imagine there could be quite a bit of room to bring mobile apps to the other projects on the go.

Conclusion

Phew, I think I made it. In some ways I envy the way that Chat GPT can rattle off 500 or so words of a post in seconds without breaking a sweat.

This weekend I had a fun conversation about the consciousness of computers and it’s clearly got me thinking. I think we are much closer than the average person. I think it’s only appropriate to end this post with one more project that sits deep in the back of my head. I would like to start becoming more familiar with Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI in general in order to build my own. So far the project only has a name, Eve, and I might have to give up a rib for it to succeed.