Vortex Update: 7 months later

Previously I wrote about my upcoming trip through the Vortex. It's no longer upcoming and I'm still on the other side, so I'm severely biased and you can't trust anything I say about it. But I thought I'd give a quick status update on my stated goals from last time:

• Work on customer-facing real technology products. Success. Not released yet, but you'll see.
• Help solve some serious internet-wide problems, like traffic shaping, etc. Yes, a bit, on my 20% project for now. You'll see that too. :) Must try harder.
• Keep coding, maybe manage a small team. Yes, with more of the latter and less of the former, but the ratio is under my control.
• Keep working on my open source projects. Sort of. Spreading myself so thin with cool projects that these are suffering, but that's nobody's fault but mine.
• Eat a lot of free food. Yes, though in fact I've lost weight, giving lie to the so called "Google 20."
• Avoid the traps of long release cycles and ignoring customer feedback. Total fail. The mechanics of this (totally under my control, but with lots of pressure to do it "wrong") are kind of interesting and I might be able to post about it later. For now let's just admit that I wanted to say my team had a product out by now (at least in public invite-only testing), and we don't, and that's mostly my fault.
• Avoid switching my entire life to Google products. Partial success, I have an Apple TV instead. But they gave me a free Android phone that (as far as I can tell) has actual garbage collection freezes while I'm typing on the virtual keyboard. So... fail.
• Produce more valuable software, including revenue, inside Google than I would have by starting a(nother) startup. Won't know until we release something.

Conclusion: mixed results. But the good news is that where things aren't as good as I'd like, the root cause can be traced to me. Does that sound like a bad thing? No! It's pretty much the ideal case when it comes to motivating me to learn fast and produce more. I'm working on the right stuff in the right ways, and the environment is well configured for me to do some amazing work. There is effectively no management interference (or input) at all. I just need to correct some of my own methodological flaws, especially trimming and prioritizing what I work on.

More later.