Hi all!

This is the first edition of my weekly email newsletter, the "pilot" as it would be called in Hollywood circles. At the moment though, my audience isn't nearly as big as your typical Hollywood TV series, but hey: slow beginnings, right?

But from here things can only go up! My goal is to build up an audience of 1.000 interested subscribers by the end of 2021 and you are the few (we lucky few, we band of brothers) to be a part of that group. Thanks so much for that!

In this first email, I will keep it simple and share with you a couple of things I have seen, heard, learned, discovered or made me smile in the couple of weeks. Hopefully at least one (and ideally all) of them will help you in some way, shape or form as it did me.

1) Product I'm enjoying

A couple of weeks ago, I bought a new garden hose since my old one was a relic from my parents which was running on it's last legs for a couple of years now. So I went online and bought a Gardena Comfort 35 Roll-up Automatic and I could not be happier. The wall mount is amazing, the 35m in length is incredibly useful but the automatic roll-up is THE killer feature. Not the cheapest thing on the market, but definitely worth every penny.

2) Video I watched

I'm an avid followed of both history and Heavy Metal, which gives the Swedish band Sabaton a very special place in my heart. I've followed their career for over 7 years now and still listen to them pretty much every day, even now.

Recently though, they stepped up their game by teaming up with Indy Nydell, an American historian, to tell the stories behind their songs in an extremely compelling YouTube series called Sabaton History. And one of their last videos covers an incredibly unlikely interesting story: the battle for Itter castle, where American soldiers teamed up with the Wehrmacht, an SS captain and the Austrian resistance to save a bunch of high-profile French prisoners from hard-core Nazis in an Austrian Medieval castle.. You cannot make this up.

The story itself is as unlikely as it is compelling, and Indy's incredible skills as a story teller make the video a real pleasure to watch. But this one hit even closer to home than usual since I've actually been to Wörgl, which is one of the locations in Tirol where all this stuff went down. I didn't know about this story at the time, but safe to say I'll definitely be going back there at some point in the future and visit castle Itter!

3) What I realized

My company, Ixudra, is 7 years old now. 7 years! Just a couple more years and he'll be a teenager and he'll be going to Highschool... Man, they grow up so fast!

Jokes aside though, we get caught up in the minutia of our every day lives so much that we forget how far we've come. But sometimes it's good to take a step back and see if you're still going in the right direction. This isn't one of those points for me though: a little over a year ago, I already did a comprehensive review of my first years as a freelancer on my company blog. And since not much has changed since then, I see little point in doing it again right now. Hopefully though, I'll have plenty to talk about by the time the next anniversary comes around.

4) What I'm teaching

As a software developer, I firmly believe that our world will become only more digital with the passing of time. With this in mind, I'm convinced that it's important to teach our kids the basics of programming from a very young age.

And since last week, I've been doing exactly that with my daughter Hannah. She has already shown quite an aptitude for maths and languages and has been playing Minecraft for a couple of months now. So programming shouldn't be a problem, right?

And she loves it! Using exercises on Code.org, she's already mastered basic programming concepts like loops and step by step we're making our way to more complex puzzles. Just a couple more years and I can retire and she can take over the business! #dadDreams

5) What I'm working on

After a brief pause due to COVID-19, I've started working on my podcast once again. Back in March when the pandemic hit hard in Belgium, I actually had 3 episodes locked in my calendar which unfortunately all had to cancelled due to the lockdown. Right now, I'm working hard to get those back on the schedule and also trying to get more guests to appear on the show.

As of yesterday, I once again have 4 speakers ready and planned in the next 3 weeks and 4 more confirmed or interested in participating. I will provide you with more info as soon as I have it, but for now you can always listen to my current episodes via businessmindset.be or any podcast provider such as iTunes or Spotify and others (all episodes in Dutch).

That's it for now. Once again, thanks so much for supporting me on this adventure. Please let me know how you liked this content. This is supposed to be a conversation, so don't hesitate to hit reply if you have any questions or remarks. I will read (and respond to) every reply!

Jan