Cindy's Newsletter #12 - My philosophy for life, business and homesteading

What homesteading has taught me about business.

I’ve started out my business less than a year ago, freelancing and now attempting to build out a few SaaS ideas, but I’ve been a homesteader for many years. Homesteading has been instrumental in shaping my current business philosophy.

When you’re homesteading, you’re doing many things yourself that most people would instead buy, such as growing vegetables and making your own bread.

It may not be cost-effective at a glance, but when you’re homesteading, you’re investing your time to get a good return in various products for your household, instead of selling your time outside and buying products with after-tax dollars. It’s creating money like a business!

I’m in for the good food and for the fun of making, but having a baseline level of efficiency is important. It’s a way of life that can easily eat up all your spare time with all those small projects and various side quests, so might as well make the most of it.

Check out the rest of this post at https://cindypotvin.com/my-philosophy-for-life-business-and-homesteading/, it was getting pretty long!

Projects updates

I just finished testing a small electronics project: it’s a board with two relay that can be plugged into Home Assistant using ESPHome. Each relay show up as a switch entity in Home Assistant.

It’s already available on my GitHub (https://github.com/CindyPotvin/WifiRelayESPHome), but I still need to fix an issue with the published schematic and PCB. I’m now using GPIO12 and GPIO13 instead of GPIO9 and GPIO10 in the currently published version since they were causing random resets. I’ll also write a longer article soon.

Feeling of the week

I planted my first seedlings of the year so I feel pretty good!

Ways I can help you

• Get your cozy, made-to-fit wool socks at my brand new shop https://manibassocks.com

• For my Canadian friends, I have a nano business selling seeds from my garden at https://sentiersperdus.net/en. Sorry, due to various phytosanitary concerns, it’s hard to ship those outside Canada.

• Don’t hesitate to reply to this email if you want to chat about software development, or show me seedling pictures.