July 2023 - Life Update

Hello! July is here and the vibes are great in London. I'm dropping Zyns, listening to the Social Network soundtrack and building.

🤓 What I've been doing

Earlier in the month we launched Nearly officially, which involved a Product Hunt launch. Feedback was great and we're now working on lots of smaller UI tweaks based on what users have told us. To get these out, we had a long fight in the App Store review process. We won. (Mainly because we caved to Apple's demands).
Despite it being not far away, I visited Paris for the first time. I got there via the Eurostar, a train that goes from the centre of London to the centre of Paris. No faffing at airports. Paris was delightful and I'll be visiting there many more times in the future. I even got to practice my French and surprisingly managed to get by with my child-level of French, which encouraged me to practice French further.
I started training with a personal trainer and already I'm seeing improvements. There are so many small tweaks that we can make to our form to make it better and make marginal gains in lifts.
For the first time in a while, I went to the theatre to see a musical about former British Prime Minister Tony Blair (my favourite PM). While it didn't put him in a positive light, it was very funny and I highly recommend seeing it while it's on its UK tour.

📚 What I've been reading

Prisoners of Geography, Tim Marshall - A book about how where a country is and its regions determine its fate. Consider the US, a country that has abundant natural resources that's not dependent on the rest of the world, allowing it to develop a strong domestic industry during the first and second world wars.
Ultra-Processed People, Chris van Tulleken - Over the past few decades, obesity rates have sky-rocketed. And that's because of ultra-processed foods. Foods that while aren't much higher in calories than single-ingredient whole foods, are designed to make us eat more and more so we don't feel full. Not only do we want to eat more of them, but they also suppress key hormones and generally fuck with our bodies. Avoid them where you can.

🔮 What's coming up

Looking into additional revenue streams, my flatmate and I get a free car parking space where we live but we don't use it. So we rent it out and make a couple of hundred pounds a month now. And that's got me thinking, what other passive income streams can I build?