I’ve begun the long process of adding in some of my old posts from previous iterations of this site. My apologies if this triggers a load of posts in your RSS. I’m working backwards, and I’ve now added all the posts from 2023 and 2022. It will be a slow process as I’ve decided to add each post manually, importing from the markdown file I have saved. Initially I am just adding the more formal posts but may go back and add all the link posts I’ve made at some point.

A few months ago I came across a blog that has been a mainstay in my RSS feeds ever since. I enjoy each and every post for the simple reason that it is the only place to find them and the thoughts of the author.

He is introducing a new series called People and Blogs which will run for at least a year. It’s a newsletter delivered every week with an interview of a person about their blog. I’ve signed up and hope to add some interesting feeds to my RSS off the back of it.

I’ve a long standing interest in the power of habits and what they can help us accomplish. Oddly I’d never considered the impact of bad habits, but in a post on his blog Chris talks about a recent process he went through in listing out his bad habits. It’s a really interesting idea, something I’ll probably give a go in the coming days.

I really like blog posts that give a behind the scenes for design changes. I’ve just written an internal post for my work on the reasoning I’ve made changes to a key part of our user experience.

This is an interesting look at the effect of a new icon design for Foodnoms has increased downloads. I wish more developers and designers would be this transparent about their work. It’s great evidence that shows how important the users are in our design considerations. No matter how well you know your users you don’t know what’s the most effective design until you speak to them.

When I started this site, I was just a 19-year-old looking to have fun on the internet. After all the twists and turns, I’ve come back around to a very similar place. Now, I’m a 31-year-old who’s still looking to have fun on the internet, share my thoughts and experiences, and make friends. That’s what this blog is for, and I’m really happy with where it’s landed.

Devon Dundee posting about his journey with his blog tells a similar tale to the story of my blog. Mine started when I was 20 and has been through many different iterations since. I recently switched back to WordPress in an effort to return to an easy way to post, have fun, and have a place to share that’s mine and no one else’s.

This is a fascinating read that presents the idea that calendars should be multi layered.

We tend to think of calendars as 2D grids with mutually exclusive blocks of time, but as this example shows, not all events automatically cancel each other out. Depending on their characteristics, they can be layered on top of each other. This means we manage time in three, not two, dimensions.

Think of a meeting you need to travel to. In your calendar will be an event for the actual meeting, but you need to block off time before and after so that no one else schedules something in that time. So really the unavailable time covers when you start travelling, the meeting itself, and the time travelling back. The total time makes one layer, the meeting is a second layer, and perhaps some tasks you need to accomplish in the meeting are a third layer. It’s a great concept and one I would love to see someone build an app based on it.

Back on Wordpress. It’s been a few years and many attempts to revitalise my blog, but I’ve decided to move back to Wordpress. The ease of posting from any device using apps has trumped everything else. Things will be a bit rough over the next few days and weeks as I get old posts back but stay tuned for more.

Chris Hannah with an interesting post about writing at work. I go through phases at work where I will write a lot to help me clarify projects and make sure the problems we are trying to solve are clearly defined. Chris highlights a few other reasons he writes at work, with this one in particular standing out:

Gives the opportunity for more people to gain knowledge - Sometimes when you’re on a call or in a meeting, knowledge stays within small groups of people. But by having a written record, it allows more people (if shared appropriately) to also read it. For example, maybe a new employee wanting to know more about a piece of work/functionality, or someone on the same team that wishes to gain a better perspective of a bigger piece of work.

Sharing of knowledge is crucial in the workplace, especially in the world of hybrid and remote working. Conversations happen in private chats or small video calls and not always everyone who needs to be there is present. Some food for thought.

This post was written when this blog was based on Jekyll before I moved back to WordPress. I have kept it as part of the history of this blog.

When I moved the blog to Jekyll last year I made several decisions about the posts I would bring across. One of those was to drop several of the post types that I’d added over the years leaving only a normal blog post as the type of content I could post. I hoped that by stripping out all the cruft I would be able to focus more on my own writing and build up more of a routine to posting. Inevitably that hasn’t panned out. There have been times where I’ve posted regularly, but just as I felt like I was getting into some kind of pattern things would happen and I wouldn’t post.

Of course one thing that has never changed was that I still read articles. In fact this year I’ve focused more on RSS as a means of reading and as a result I’m reading far more than I used too. I’ve also adopted Good Links as my read later app of choice and am developing a reading work flow to help me process what I’m reading. Part of that process involves sharing what I read. So for the same reason I added the ability to share links on my blog many years ago I’ve added that ability to this one. It’s in a state I call earliest usable product like much of this blog is, but I intend to keep improving things continuously over the next few weeks.

Life is about tradeoffs. When we know what to say no to, and we know why, we can say yes with comfort and confidence to the things that matter. To the things that last.

In conversation with one of my favourite authors Austin Kleon, Ryan Holiday finished a post with this quote. They were discussing the choices between work, family, and scene, but I the sentence above can be applied to a lot of things.