the nedspace challenge

i'm on a god damned roll. i'm also broke.

(the following article was ~by far~ not what the author had in mind of the first article she would release to her audience in 2026. the planned mega-essay is still around the corner, once my work schedule becomes more…normal. when that happens, lord knows.)

well, i think it’s safe to say that i’ve officially entered ~the cool zone~ era of my life.

i am broke now. (i used to not be broke, kinda) i am not mad, it’s kinda hilarious. i’ve been crowdsurfing off the kindness of strangers since i returned to the states in october. what a strange time it has been…

you may be asking what has happened to the oh-so-prolific-was-once-publishing -almost-weekly-articles-for-almost-two-months bugwoman extraordinaire jane madden. well, i am alive — just busy. busy in my own little world, tiny little rabbit holes, the ones that drive everyone else crazy. it’s probably the strongest principal component in explaining why i am such a dilettante in love T_T….

….sometimes i get too locked in, and i kinda fall off the map. it’s the story of my life: i like to be mentally challenged, and in that way i am simple minded.

well, this time it’s different. i swear.

you see, all you have to do is give a tortured bugwoman the power of near-unlimited cognition: train a large language model good enough in your us-west-1 data center the size of at least 2^3 costco’s that is so good it framemogs not only the competition but also the pathetic remainder of the salton sea, and you may have a coin flip’s chance at changing her mind on your hyper-subsidized faustian bargain.

in this arms race, the act of powerscaling is two-sided.

while you, the destructor of the salton sea, may have that “oh god what did i just fap to” face that dr. robert j oppenheimer had during his “i have become death destroyer of worlds” moment….i, bugwoman, have finally reached my dr. strangelove moment of “how i learned to stop worrying and love the bomb”. supply meets demand. that my friends, is what we call introductory macroeconomics.

(that was my first college course, i really enjoyed it, and i got a sidequest degree out of it. thank you, mr. schulke.)

jane, what in the ever living fuck are you actually talking about?

claude code. what ozempic is for looksmaxxers, claude code is for brainmaxxers. a looksmaxxer may fork over a benjamin franklin or two to reduce the toil of their efforts, a brainmaxxer does the same with claude code for the precise cost of two benjie’s a month. truly, it’s just one benjie after another.

jane, what exactly makes claude code so effective for you?

okay listen up kiddos. imagine this. imagine if you are in a village. your village has a very strong division of labor, that means people work the roles they are best suited for. you have your farmers, smiths, wood cutters, fire makers, rune crafters, your ~one who knocks~, and person who washes clothes. in this hypothetical world, the practice of cleaning clothes is a very precise art, there is high demand for having spotless clothing. many artisans and nobles will pay a pretty penny for a good clean feeling…no matter what.

well, in this analogy, i am not the one who knocks but i am the one who cleans clothes.

the demand for clean clothes in this society is so high that you have to be a spellcaster to do it. how i got to being one? the closest analogy comes from Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, where at the end of season 1, Fern is granted a choice of one spell to learn via a grimoire by mistress Serie for passing the first class mage exam. Fern’s choice? “a spell to make clothes clean and spotless”.

in Serie’s own words to Fern’s choice, she said “you can’t be serious…”

and in terms of my work, this choice is the best microcosm of how i chose to optimize my career in technology. i frequently oriented towards the stacks, and architecture that everybody needed, but absolutely hated doing — very much like laundry. but here’s the catch, having to constantly “do the laundry” of software engineering, would take up a lot of my mana. but not only did i use a lot of my mana each day i practiced, but i had to train my way up into having a lot of mana in the first place. claude code arrived onto the scene and became my washing machine that was able to cast my spell about 80% as good as i can.

now that my time was freed up, i always wondered what other fun things i could do with my mana if i didn’t have to clean clothes for a 9-5?

well, i finally got my answer. and it is fucking insane and amazing. not only could the power of machine do my "laundry spell” at 80% skill, think about all the other “mages” who had hyper-specialized spells that i did not know how to learn or implement previously. it would have taken me years. now i could get to 80% parity in their field near instantaneously.

welcome to 2026, the year of the creative destruction of the digital world.

my mana was now freed up, everything was for the taking. i learned how to cast spells in building frontends, backends, cloud infrastructure, and even security. the window is open, and who knows for how long. but never take a good thing for granted. Frieren only had Himmel for 80 of her 1,000 or so ongoing years. i think about this a lot in terms of how much time i will get to spend on the Earth with my dog too. i am couch crashing. i cannot afford to have a room where i live with him currently. he’s back in my hometown and i miss him every day. i want to make more money so i can afford to reunite with him again. the job market in my field is terrible, slow, and never a sure bet either. it takes sometimes 4, 6, or even 8 interviews to get hired.

as i’ve gotten older, i’ve learned to cherish the good times and people (and pets) in your life that make you happy, as nothing stays the same for eternity. but even as scary as the future is now, i still hold these words to heart:

“When it is all over, what will be left for us are the most beautiful memories imaginable.”

through the countless times i have cast my laundry spell for over a decade, i have experienced great fervor and joy in learning the craft. i have already spent over 10,000 hours learning to be a violinist, now i may have to hone my skills as an orchestrator. i’m in a high-demand, resource-constrained world in 2026. what i need are good things that build results. that doesn’t mean blindly trusting a pay-to-lose scam website like Replit to drop my production database, but rather designing efficient human-and-agent tandems that work the first time they’re written. it’s been the meta i’ve followed since day 1, carefully choosing which aspects to slot the agent’s work when it jointly optimizes the end result for speed and quality.

and currently, i’m on a god damned, mother fucking roll.

i had launched this business for goofy reasons in november 2024.

i had spent countless months building what was “v1” of my software, and it was not even close to what i had dreamed from the start. all of it was so hard.

until january 2026, i originally had reached the impression that my business was not gonna make it. it just felt like a nice side project until i got a day job again. now, i stand corrected.

i had my pilot customer, and with the limitations in place, v1 was designed to kinda forever only be for them. they would keep the side project afloat and i would just push out cute updates once a week in perpetuity to enable my full stack evolution sidequest.

but then, with claude code, everything changed. and i was able to gain the market intelligence that i could. by my claude-enabled efforts alone, i designed a viable marketplace competitor to a 20+ year old software platform in under a week at 75% feature parity that is now my beta launch for the next version of my software.

that’s right, i now have a v2 of my software. while still in beta, i am planning to acquire customers very soon. i am hoping to reach the go to market phase in the next few weeks.

it has NOT been easy though. i have had to more than double my hours, i am not getting paid extra for this. many nights i get almost no sleep, i am teetering on food insecurity / starvation…but i’d say what i am hungrier for is a vision of making this newfound dream come true. a reality i could not have envisioned back in January.

every moment i have seen this project continue to evolve and succeed, against my competitor, i have gotten increasingly more giddy. this has felt like the most consequential moment yet.

every win now feels like the “i drink your milkshake scene” from There Will Be Blood. and you know what? call me dracula right now because i’m as bloodthirsty as ever and…it. keeps. getting. fucking. better.

on monday, through a happenstance meeting with a sales consultant with over 10 years of experience, i did my first ever informal demo of the v2 beta of this software. sleep deprived and on my legally prescribed xanax, i drifted through the meeting in about 30-45 minutes. kinda rambled a bit. this was their honest-to-god evaluation of my software in their own words:

“this is the kind of product pitch us on the career sales side of business would drool over”

not getting into the semantics about World War I, but this message has become my personal Zimmerman Telegram. the original Zimmerman Telegram was a mechanism to draw the United States into World War I. the sales memo is, a mechanism to draw me into what i call the nedspace challenge.

and now, you may ask, good friend, perhaps blood relative, or even stranger, what is the nedspace challenge?

the nedspace challenge is very simple. i am raising $750 USD as soon as possible to gain entry to two months at nedspace. month-to-month after that. that is my entire ask. this is my one time i am raising out the tip jar, to enable me to achieve a rare shot at an amazing opportunity.

and why do you need a nedspace membership ASAP?

i am in week 2 of the beta with my pilot customer. the hype levels are increasing day-by-day. my sales pitch is becoming convincing enough that i am now receiving legitimate interest in angel investor microgrants (not a large sum for a YC type but huge for an impoverished bugwoman). not only do i need to keep working on the beta until its ready for release…i also need a slide deck, a budget proposal, and 24 uninterrupted hours of deep work that i cannot get from the couch i am crashing on. i do not have a desk where i am staying. i do not have a whiteboard. all i have is my laptop and my thoughts currently. the window is now, which means i want to procure myself the best conditions possible given my budgetary constraints without help from the outside world.

all what matters to me, a hardcore and dedicated technical founder, is finding a great place to work with like minded people while staying in the city i love.

nedspace has been launching startups since 2009. it is the most established coworking space in the city. startups coming out of nedspace have collectively raised $55 million. not bad for portland, a city where the dream of the 90’s is still alive. using the dream of the 90’s is still alive logic to adjust for inflation that’s around $113 million¹ today.

nedspace has 24/7 access, showers, and a program where founders literally break-test each other's software. it is the exact room i need to be in right now. at nedspace, i can once again engage in a chinamaxxing 996 lifestyle that i am often familiar with in academia. sure it is not the healthiest one, but in moments that require extreme effort and clarity, your environment matters supremely. and right now, my ancestors require that i lock in. in the words of former Nintendo of America president Reginald Fils-Aimé: “My body is ready”.

do it for him

between all of the heavy work i am currently committed to, i have a ritual i do when i am running this tool that we call “claude code”. as i let a long session execute, i like to pull up this image on my computer and have it sit side-by-side with whatever claude is doing to help further my mission. every late night, every time i have to go in and fix the CI environment again, every moment i fret over a page crash late at night…i know it is worth it, because through my great efforts i will succeed and be able to bring my dog back up to Oregon, and buy plenty of treats for him too. once i bring him back here, i can’t wait to see his little dance every time i come home, to be able to take him on long walks in Laurelhurst, and also to have him curl up by my side on the bed after a long day of work.

by the way, did i mention that he gives great hugs?

i miss him dearly, i will work as hard as i can to make this situation work out for the both of us. thankfully, my friend is watching him back down in California for now.

jane, you devilish bugwoman, i’m sold. how do i help you complete the nedspace challenge?

In the voice of PilotRedSun’s Santa from grinch’s ultimatum

“alright buddy, you have two options here.

you can donate on ko-fi…

or you can donate on Substack…

those are your two choices…

so choose wisely…huh? huh?

on ko-fi? (KOH-FYE)

or on Substack? (SOUB-STACK)

and that’s the tale of the nedspace challenge.

thank you for reading this

my promise to you all, is when i find stable footing again, is to continue to write great essays as the time permits.

if you would like to collaborate in a technical or business setting, feel free to DM me on Substack. if you ever just want to hear me talk about the actual stuff i do, but don’t understand it in full, that’s fine too. i am always an appreciator of an audience who wants to listen to me talk shop.

1. Source: https://www.minneapolisfed.org/about-us/monetary-policy/inflation-calculator (Using 1996 USD)