10 Things I'm Good At (And Could Teach)

Made most of my living off of this for almost 16 years now. I taught myself HTML in 1996 (I was 11). There are a lot of aspects to the method and industry, but the fundamentals don't change.

This technically should come *before* the first point, but it's the harder part to grasp. Once you know *how* to build an app or a thing, you really should know why it should exist and for whom it is most useful. How about the way it generates revenue? Is it scalable? Is it a drag on society or a boon? Will individuals buy it or is it for an enterprise to rent for a high per-seat fee? That's not all: if you're dealing with startups, investors, teammates, bosses, owners, salespeople, programmers, and users themselves, there's a whole skill stack that goes into managing the moving parts and making sure what you're creating makes sense to everybody else (and they need to feel like it was their idea or your thing is never getting shipped).

Once you've been involved in the trenches of design teams for a while, you might want to go off on your own and not have a true boss anymore. This is scary and it's not for everyone (I don't think Tesla or Space X needs a bunch of consultants showing up every 6-9 months to build rockets for example. Their in-house teams need full time dedication to the effort).

But, you can make a lot of teams and people more successful by showing up for 3-6 months at a time and helping them refine their ideas. Sometimes, it's just talking the problem through with someone and redirecting their anxiety and concerns into productive outcomes. It's the hardest part of the design skill stack and uses skills that have nothing to do with design or software or marketing.

The act itself is a stack of skills: communication, abbreviation, improvisation, scheduling, social interaction, mathematics, storytelling, confidence, hypnosis (aka shared group hallucination), writing, editing, art (sometimes).

I would likely need some qualified personal training licensure to be considered reputable, but I could teach you how to safely start lifting weights.

I ran 3 in a year. I had to train myself and teach myself how to do it and overcome the mental and physical challenges of the effort. Going from the minor leagues to the major leagues is a big step for a lot of people. It's a big crossover point in their physical fitness journey. I'm not a winning runner. I won because I got off the couch and ran 26.2 miles a few times.

I wrote and published a roleplaying game over the past couple of years. I also have designed several games that never saw the light of day. Some board, some RPG, some video games.

A little niche, but the software Tabletop Simulator is an interesting 3D simulation of tabletop gaming. It has an API and scripting engine that allows you to automate things in engine. I spent a lot of time teaching myself how this system works to produce some automated "mods". I could probably teach you how to do it well enough or at least show you how I made mine (they're not perfect, I'm not a programmer).

It's a skill that gets you from idea to experiment to information in no time. You don't build the whole thing, you build a meaningful part of it and test it out. But, building the right thing at the right time for the right audience is what gets you the best results.

More niche stuff, but I don't run any of my online RPG games through a cloud service anymore (like DnDBeyond, roll20, etc.). I have a mini PCB (kind of a raspberry pi knockoff) attached to my network running a reserve proxy pointing to a custom URL I own that my friends can log into to play games. This means I'm in control of uptime. It's a big deal.