Matthew Lang

This weekend was something of a bust. It's that time of year when kids of a certain age turn from innocent little chaps and madams to plague carrying monsters. Little Drew started us off with a case of the lurgy last week and it's ran rife through the house. There's still a couple of us fighting on into this week. Hopefully by next weekend we'll all be back to full health.

On a more positive note this weekend saw the return of what for me is the greatest show on Earth. The Super Bowl. I get that not everyone likes it, but there's no denying it was a great game to watch.

I had no intentions of staying up to watch the game though having already started my lurgy phase and the fact that I was working the next day, so I recorded the game in the hopes of watching it the next day.

I already knew the score before watching the game, some media blackouts you just can't get through unless you unplug your wireless router but I needed that for work.

It certainly wasn't a disappointing game. The Falcons routed the Patriots in the first half but the momentum of the Falcons started to die in the second half. Despite the rocky start in the third quarter the Patriots stepped up and proved that there were more than capable of matching the Falcons in their first-half.

With the game tied, the Super Bowl went into overtime for the first time. The Patriots opted to receive the punt, made the drive to the red-zone and scored the touchdown. Game over.

It's hardly seems fair to decide a game like this, maybe they should play the whole overtime quarter regardless of the number of possessions each time has and decide it on points.

Anyway, that's the Patriots and the Brady/Belichick combo with their fifth Super Bowl win. So the countdown begins to the next season.

Me and Ethan are Packer fans but Jennifer and Drew like the Patriots and no-one was as happy as Drew was when he discovered that his team had won the Super Bowl.

Selected by Time magazine to be the most influential images of all time.

Warning. Some people may find some of these images distressing.

The complete mix of human emotion. Photographs that feature amazement, happiness and sadness. An amazing collection.

via Kottke.org

I haven't done any sketchnotes for a while but seeing Mike Rohde's great Packers game sketchnotes got me curious about doing the same for the Ryder Cup. For a first attempt it wasn't bad.

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

It’s been a while since I updated my daily email service, DailyMuse. It’s a year old now and I’m finding it to be a great start to the day. If you’re unfamiliar with it, then here’s the gist.

DailyMuse emails you single snippet of text from your own collection of snippets. Think of it as your nudge for the day. In the past year I’ve collected a number of quotes, lists and nudges that I keep here. Every day I get an email from DailyMuse with one of these snippets.

For the last year thought the service hasn’t unchanged. It’s not through lack of work on my part. I’ve built three different features and trashed them on the basis that they’re not suitable or too complicated for DailyMuse. The last thing I want to do is complicate DailyMuse but I do want it to be a more powerful nudge in the morning, and not just for me.

Here’s a few ideas I’ve been pondering on for DailyMuse.

The Daily Mantra

I recently read Paul Graham’s Top of Your Todo List post in which he talks about 5 commands that sit at the top of his todo list. It’s a nice idea but I don’t have space at the top of my todo list, but getting something like this in all my DailyMuse emails would be a nice idea.

Rather than having the commands at the top though, I thought about including it in the footer of the email. That way once you’ve read through your nudge for the day, the last thing you’ll read will be your commands.

Call it commands, a daily mantra, a motto. It could be anything, but lots of people live by this in some form and a daily reminder of it couldn’t hurt.

Categories

One of the trashed ideas for DailyMuse was adding the ability to organise snippets using tags. The daily email from DailyMuse could then send a snippet from a specific tag on different days. After testing the idea though I realised that tags allowed for a huge number of ways of organising your snippets. It was overkill.

Tags was too granular for organising snippets. I needed something broader, something simpler. Rather than organising snippets into tags, how about organising them into categories? One category per snippet is much simpler and with a limited set of categories to play with it means that people have a simpler way of organising their snippets.

Cards, Not Snippets

There’s one thing that has irked me since I built DailyMuse and that’s the use of the word snippets. I don’t like the word snippets, but it seemed like the best way to describe the information you collect for your DailyMuse emails. Maybe it’s my developer background that swayed towards this, but it isn’t the right word to describe what these snippets are. I had to get away from the programmer influence for this.

If DailyMuse was a paper-based service that didn’t rely on computers then how would it work in the real world? Well, every day you receive your snippet in the post, but it wouldn’t be on a letter because that’s for long form writing. DailyMuse is all about getting a short burst of information every day. It would need to be on something smaller. A card. An index card.

What wasn’t obvious in the past when I built DailyMuse now is. Rather than using the term snippets, I should have used cards.

This is one change to DailyMuse that is happening. A change in the terminology should simplify what DailyMuse is and encourage more people to sign up for it.

Find the Right Features

DailyMuse is still a side-project. While it does have a number of paying customers, it’s just enough to cover the hosting costs for most of the year. I’m taking my time with it and allowing it to a grow at a steady pace.

Not everything I build for DailyMuse get shipped. I’ve trashed more features for DailyMuse than I’ve added. I’m trying to keep it simple and easy to use. Burdening it with features isn’t going to make it anymore useful but it does have some space for improvement. I just need to find the right features that fit that space.

Makes you wonder why on Earth the US military has needed billions for more advanced bombers when this still works.

The B-52 is an Air Force plane that refuses to die. Originally slated for retirement generations ago, it continues to be deployed in conflict after conflict. It dropped the first hydrogen bomb in the Bikini Islands in 1956, and laser-guided bombs in Afghanistan in 2006. It has outlived its replacement. And its replacement’s replacement. And its replacement’s replacement’s replacement.

— After 60 Years, B-52s Still Dominate U.S. Fleet by The New York Times

This is why I love American football.

A nice reminder that there are more pressing matters in the world than the growing number of icons in my menubar.

We are becoming disconnected from collective issues for want of personal entertainment. If continued, informing the masses on domestic and foreign affairs could very well devolve into an exercise in herding cats. While the individual might not see this as an issue, the collective should because it will influence entire generations. Those who cannot see past themselves are doomed.

— The Public Square of You by Caesura Letters

NB is back with essential skills for the new semester. Number 6 on the list is strictly enforced in our house on a Sunday from September to the end of the year.

Relaxation: the ability to easily let go of the deadline for 8 hours and get some quality sleep, to watch the game without guilt, to know what is truly important at this point. Do less, achieve more.

— Back to School II by Nicholas Bate

During this time the rule is that Sundays are for home cooked meals, everyone sitting round the table to enjoy it, taking the boys for a walk on their bikes and then sitting down for a couple of hours of NFL.

It's been quiet of late on my blog and for a good reason. While my daily posts have ground to an almost complete stop, I do have a good reason for it.

Today I'm officially (and nervously) announcing a micro-service of mine, DailyMuse. So what is DailyMuse? Well, let me first take you back to a post that Patrick Rhone made on App.net.

Maybe something like this exists but, if not, someone should build it: I want to type a bunch of things into a place and then have that place pick a thing at random and email it to me once a day.

I made a note of this post with the intention of building something, but I never got round to it. Patrick's tweet in October was finally the nudge that I needed.

"Making cool stuff for our friends that they would like" sounds like a solid, successful, business plan to me.

— on App.net by Patrick Rhone

Now while I don't know Patrick personally, having not met him in person, he is someone who is a great influencer on how I work. His books are great source of reflection and I've long been a fan and user of his Dash/Plus system. So having established that I'm not friends with Patrick in the traditional sense, I still wanted to make this "thing" for him.

Having toyed with a few ideas before the end of last year, I started putting something more concrete together that Patrick could use. After a couple of weeks I had the basics of the service working. After a brief introduction by email, Patrick became the first user of DailyMuse.

That's the story behind the idea, but what is it? I think it can be best summed up as this:

DailyMuse is your own personal email subscription. You're the curator and audience.

Using DailyMuse you can collect quotes, phrases, lists and links in your own collection of snippets. DailyMuse then sends you one of these snippets at random, once a day.

Snippets are written in plain text or using Markdown. You can tell DailyMuse to pick a snippet at random or to pick from a queue of previously unsent snippets.

Receving the same snippet on consecutive days doesn't offer much value, so I added the ability to pick from snippets that hadn't previously been sent. There is still a lot to be done with it, but with the it's core value in place and working, it didn't make sense to hold on to it and never ship it.

So if getting the right start to the day sounds like your thing, and you don't mind curating your own collection of content to start the day with, then why not give DailyMuse a try? It's free for 30 days after which you can subscribe for $2 per month or £20 per year.

Last night, round about 5pm, I closed down my work apps, shut the lid on MacBook and left my iPhone at my desk. I checked my son was doing his homework right and proceeded to get the dinner started for the rest of the troops coming home. Not much different from most weekday nights really. Other people had different plans though.

Last night Apple announced more information for their Apple Watch and a new MacBook, as well as a few other things I guess. Don't worry, this isn't a post analysis of the event. It's a few words about my increasing indifference to Apple media events.

I like my Apple products. They help me make a sustainable living, they make the daily grind easier, they make connecting with remote family easier and they can even go with me everywhere letting me capture those little moments in life that you always want to remember. I could buy alternatives to them, but the prospect of getting different platforms and apps talking to each other and working isn't something I want to do. I just want my devices to connect and work so that I can get on with more important things. That's all they need to do.

At no point last night did I feel the need to watch Apple's event or even read the flood of nonsense tech journalism that followed it. I skimmed through my timeline on Twitter and I saw a couple of hundred tweets mentioning the Apple Watch and about maybe twenty or so tweets mentioning the new MacBook. So the Apple Watch is a given, but I'm not interested in that in the slightest. The new MacBook was interesting though, so I checked the specs on the Apple website. Job done. It probably took me a couple of minutes to do that. I refused to spend any more time digesting the why and how of Apple announcements or read any of the associated articles with the luring headlines by technology news sites that at the end of the day just want people to click through to their site for advertising.

The reason why I'm becoming so uninterested in the actual Apple media event is that anything remotely Apple related is over hyped to the point where you would think that Tim Cook was announcing world peace on the stage. Last night's event announced information for a product that we already knew about and information on a new product as well as other minor announcements. If this was made by any other tech company it would have got a minimal amount of coverage at best, but because it's Apple we get flurry of tech sites falling over themselves to be seen to be reporting on the event. Live blogging the event, doing a post event analysis and then making their final predictions on whether the product will be a success or notand usually whether it will make or break Apple. It's too much and thats what puts me off them. Not necessarily the even itself, but the inflated media interest around it.

Next time Apple make an announcement, I'll do the same. Leave all my gadgets at my desk and get on with the rest of the day, because even though I've bought into the Apple world of products, I can catch up with the changes in their product line-up on their website and in my own time.

A little reminder that while we're connected in more ways now than we have ever been, our number of meaningful connections doesn't change at all.

The lesson to learn from Dunbar might be this: our pursuit of building ever-expanding and “influential” networks might be a fundamentally vain pursuit. Rarely, perhaps never, do our lives comprise of more than about 150 meaningful relationships. Although a digitally connective world might suggest that the size of our network is representative of our ‘value’ or ‘potential’ to have an influence on others, our human network capacity probably has not really changed at all.

— One Hundred and Fifty People: Revisiting Dunbar’s Number by Caesura Letters

Even before I started freelancing, I always got confused by the almost interchangeable career titles of freelancers and the jobs that were available to them. Contractor, consultant and freelancer. Are they specific to the type of work freelancers do?

When I started freelancing, I decided to market myself as a "Freelance Web Developer". I had thought about the different titles I could use but I paid more attention to the technology field rather than the type of work I would be doing. I stuck with the title of freelancer as I simply thought it best described who I was. This was almost right, I wanted to freelance but what I wanted to start work on was contract work.

Starting Out As A Contractor

To begin with I was keen to look for roles where I could gain a bit more experience working as part of a remote development team. I wanted to work in remote teams to see how they continue to progress with projects. In the past I worked in teams that shared the same physical space and therefore communication with other team members was easy. How does this affect remote teams?

I also wanted to gain more experience in my preferred choice of technology stack. I had a number of roles working with Ruby on Rails, but I was definitely far from being an expert on the framework. A few gigs working in different teams would quickly identify areas where I might be short on knowledge. Thankfully this wasn't a problem.

Armed with these two goals, I found out that contracting would be the best work for me. As a contractor I can market myself as a development resource to clients. They might be looking for that extra programmer needed to finish a project or they might need a developer with experience in a technology stack that they are lacking in. Whatever the reason, my primary role as a freelancer so far is as a contractor.

Long Term Focus As A Freelancer

I don't want to be a contractor forever though. In time I would like to gradually move across to being more than just another "butt in a seat".

Contracting is good because it means the decisions are largely removed from your hands. Your clients decide the work for you and you as the contractor fulfil your client's needs. While this type of work does pay the bills and keeps my career going, I don't believe that this should be my long term goal.

Doing the work is one thing, but advising the client in the way in which they can best achieve their aims is the work of the consultant. While I could market myself exclusively as a contractor, I would in fact like to be more than just another programmer in the team. I would like to be more of mix between contractor and consultant.

What's The Next Step?

This is where I believe the term freelancer applies to the type of business I want to have. I love programming, and being able to work with a client's team and help fill a gap is where I'm comfortable and productive. It shouldn't be my only selling point though. To do this, I'm going to need a web site that focuses on business and freelancing and nothing more. It's going to need material such as test cases and examples of work that back up my abilities as both a contractor and a consultant. I'll see what I can come up with.

It's been a while since I last posted about the books I have been reading so here's what I've managed to finish in the last couple of months.

Hannibal Series: Enemy of Rome, Fields of Blood & Clouds of War by Ben Kane

I do enjoy books based on this era and while there are many books in this genre, there are only a handful of authors who get it right. Ben Kane is one of them and his series set against the Second Punic War is great to read and grand in scale. Great characters, story and action and a little glimpse into a point in history that some might not know too much about.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Set in the near future when fossil fuels have ran dry and the divide between rich and poor has grown, many people are escaping a harsh world into a virtual universe. If you grew up in the eighties you'll love this book. The story uses many of the popular videos games, table top games, movies and people who were popular with kids in the eighties. I loved it.

Blood Song: Book 1 of Raven's Shadow by Anthony Ryan

Fantasy books have been a bit hit and miss with me lately. To be honest I had almost given up on the genre. After a run of non-starters though I finally found something worth reading. Abandoned by his father at a military school, Vaelin Al Sorna has to pass a training programme that will test his limits. Then he must use his skills for the benefit of the Faith. A dark story, but it was really entertaining. Can't want to move onto the next book.

The Red Line: The Gripping Story of the RAF's Bloodiest Raid by John Nicol

After reading Anthony Beevor's book, The Second World War, my interest in the subject has been renewed with some interest. A chance spotting of a Lancaster bomber flying overhead on holiday was the nudge I needed to read this book about the RAF's raid on Nuremberg in 1944. Amazing stories of the crews who flew on this mission and amazing accounts of those who survived. Highly recommended.

At long last I managed to finish The Second World War which has been holding up my reading list for the last few months. Here's a few reviews of what I've been reading over the last few months.

• The Second World War by Antony Beevor - Without doubt this is the most complete and detailed account of the Second World War that you will find on any bookshelf. The bibliography alone takes up the last quarter of the book with supporting material from other books as well as journals of military personnel and civilians providing eye witness accounts of events. The book covers all the critical events from the leading up to the start of WWII until it's final days when Japan surrendered to the US. It seems wrong to say that I enjoyed this book given the topic, but I did. It was a learning experience for me. A chance to find out everything I didn't know about the Second World War. There were parts of the book that I found troubling to read, but the incidents that the book highlighted only re-inforce the human cost of war and why it should be avoided at all costs.
• Inferno by Dan Brown - Dan Brown's books sometimes receives unfair criticism that they are not of the same calibre as other great fictional books but I've never found that. I enjoyed this book. Another outing for the Harvard symbologist. It was a good read and it kept me turning pages right to the end. One concern I have though for these books are their duration. Like the Chase / Wilde series by Andy McDermott, I'm starting to see a repeating pattern in the adventures of Langdon as he hops across the world, interpreting symbols and saving the world. I don't think there's much mileage left in these books if Brown decides to write more of them, but I still found this book enjoyable.
• The City by Stella Gemmell - I wanted to love this book so much as I thought that it being from someone who was close to David Gemmell when he was alive, it might have some influences from him. I started the book with enthusiasm but it quickly wained over the course of the first sixty pages. I found it to be slow with no sign of picking up. After sixty pages I eventually gave up and moved on to something else.
• Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck & Cynthia Andres - It's been on the reading list for a while, but it's taken me to now to read it thanks to a prompt by another developer on App.net who mentioned he was reading it to get back to the basics of extreme programming again. The ideas and practices that I learned from this book just back up for me how important agile practices are to software development. A must read for any software developer whether they are starting their career or want to re-kindle those basics of good software development practices again.

Every yeay I read that blogs are dead or declining in use.

Blogs obviously aren't dead and I acknowledged that much right from the title. I (obviously) think there's a lot of value in the blog format, even apart from its massive influence on online media in general, but as someone who's been doing it since 1998 and still does it every day, it's difficult to ignore the blog's diminished place in our informational diet.

— RIP The Blog - 1997 to 2013 by Jason Kottke

Despite the declining use of blogs, I think they're still a great format for publishing and I'll continue to blog and read other blogs until they are truly dead.

This week I migrated my master list over to the Todoist service. I've been using Taskpaper for most of the year but one thing that is evidently missing from using this is that I have no way of easily reviewing the past week's completed tasks. I could put together a script that would count the number of completed tasks on each day in the archived section, but I keep putting it off. The other half of the problem is the synchronising conflicts I was getting from syncing my master list to Dropbox.

In the end I decided that it was definitely time to try something else. That's when I noticed Todoist while browsing the App Store. Unlike many cloud based task management services it does track the number of completed tasks for you while you work. As the end of the week draws near I am looking forward to seeing a healthy number of completed tasks for each day of the week.

Like Taskpaper, Todoist does support the concept of labels and projects which I still need. One last feature which is really nice is the templates feature. When you frequently do the same tasks over and over again, Todoist lets you export tasks as a template so that you can import them again.

It's fair to say that I've given Taskpaper a fair go but my needs have evolved over the last few months. I'm hoping that Todoist fits my needs for the foreseeable future.

As an American football fan, I thought this was such a refreshing take on the game. Given that this level of football has fewer risks when adopting such a strategy, it would still be great to see this approach in the NFL.

Slow plays, always punting on the 4th down and running the clock down are making the game safer for the teams. Safer for the winning team, but a drab to watch as a fan.

via Grantland

While flicking through my App.net timeline last week, I stumbled across a post by Guido Osorios which led me to reading about his reasons for downgrading his account on App.net to the free account.

I hate the fact that I originally payed for a great social API that didn’t hold up well at all. A little over a year has passed since its beginning, and so much about App.net permanently changed, and in my experience, it did for the bad. Sure, it may have hundreds of thousands of registered users now, but most of what made App.net different is long gone — I haven’t discovered a single person in months by now.

— Downgrading App.net by Guido Osorios

While I don't agree with Guido's comment about the direction that the API is taking, I do agree with his concern about finding people on App.net.

I am also finding it increasingly difficult to find people. With the introduction of PourOver, the number of feed accounts have risen and will likely continue. Having these types of accounts are great for members of App.net, but it would be nice to be able to search for just people in Alpha and not have any bot or feed accounts show up.

Maybe it's time for a search directory of just people accounts on App.net?

It would be great to have more people to follow on App.net especially some people I miss from Twitter, but that can only happen if more people join. Now that we have free accounts for people to try it out, I thought there would have been an influx of people but alas it seems that most people are happy to stay on Twitter.

Yet another big Apple announcement goes by and yet again we see just marginal improvements on the products that Apple have become famous for. Not that I was expecting anything grand or game changing, it's just that the hype around these things by tech sites and magazines is reaching the scales of ridiculous.

It seems common place now for magazine sites like The Verge to live blog these events even though we know 90% of what's coming. I wasn't surprised by anything that was announced at the event. 64-bit processors in the new iPhone 5S ... not surprised. Fingerprint security ... thought it was coming. It comes in gold! We already knew that.

Then there's the analysis and opinions of millions of people on whether this is Apple at their best or not. A million pointless questions being asked and everyone has their own answer. Not that it matters of course, because Apple will do what Apple want to do regardless of the views and opinions of others.

Debating on topics is fun, but I'm bored with the Apple debate now. Let them do what they do best, it's clearly working for them. If you like their products then fine, buy them. If not, go find an alternative. The world doesn't need a million different view points on a phone or a computer or anything materialistic like that.

There are more important things happening right now like state surveillance, war, chemical weapons and conflict. Maybe if these were debated with the same energy as the latest iPhone, we might actually make enough noise for those who should be listening to invoke change. It's a long shot, but it's worth a try.

Yesterday I introduced you to the first step to getting productive, keeping a master list of everything you want to do and must do. So what's next? Just pick off the stuff we want to do? No. We need order. We can't do everything at once, but we also want to move towards what we want to do while at the same time checking of those mundane tasks we need to do. We need to prioritise.

Take your list and sort it. It's as simple as that. Put the stuff you want to do sooner at the top and the stuff that can wait at the bottom. Simple right? No numbering systems or sort labels here. Just the order of the list itself. Granted this is easier if your list is managed with something like TaskPaper, but I think that even doing this with pen and paper isn't going to be too long an exercise. Also, with pen and paper it gives you a chance to think about each item on your list. Is it important? Can it wait?

Prioritising your list is one of the simplest things you can do to get your list in an order that makes it easy to tackle. Cherry picking items from your master list will lead to you only doing the easy things or things you want to do. Doing this will mean that you'll never get round to writing that novel or building the next big app that will take the world by storm. Prioritising your list gives you an order in which to tackle your list. You're putting the items that matter or need to be done at the top of your list.

I usually review my master list on a weekly basis. Usually this involves just moving the items that have been recently added to their appropriate space in the list. My priorities are long term, so the order of my list doesn't change drastically from week to week. What I do see though is items gradually moving up the list which shows that I am moving forward with my projects and tasks and there's nothing lying stale at the bottom of the list for too long.

Don't forget to mix the list so that it's not all the things you want to do at the top. Working towards a dream holiday or breaking the top 10 best selling books can't be your only focus. There's still stuff to do on a day to day basis. Bills need to be paid, kids need to be taken to their extra curricular activities and such. So make sure your list is evenly mixed with those things you want to do and things you must do. Keeping this balance is important to working through your master list.

There’s a great line from the start of “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” spoken by everyone’s favourite pirate Jack Sparrow.

Complications arose, ensued, were overcome.

If only it was that easy. It is never that easy. When complications do happen, are we making things complicated for ourselves?

I do. I make things ridiculously complicated sometimes when I’m writing code. I’m always thinking too far ahead. What if we need to do this, what if the format changes? I’m always thinking of edge cases for features that won’t be encountered on a daily basis. I find it quite a hard habit to break.

Take for example this form I was working on yesterday. It required three things:

1. A question
2. Your email address
3. A list of other email addresses

So handling the first two things is easy, but I wanted to do something smart with the list of email addresses so that people could input any number of email addresses. I ended up with a form like this:

Handling the code to add and remove the email addresses from the list wouldn’t be too difficult but it’s clearly not the easiest thing to do. Annoyed at the complicated form I would need to build, I left my project to do some client work that had been scheduled in.

Then it hit me that night. What else uses lists of email addresses that are not constrained by size? When you are writing an email you simply enter the names of the people you want to send the email to. In one textbox. It’s that easy. The next day I changed my form to use a single textbox for the list of email addresses. A complicated form made easy.

Two things I took from this:

1. Keep it simple stupid

The KISS principle is a recurring topic in software development, but we developers tend to think of the YAGNI (You aren’t gonna need it) principle. The two are similar, but what I need to remember is the simplest and stupidest way is always going to work. It might not be clever, but as long as a simple design works, we should use it. If the simple design can’t handle an edge case in the future we can fix it then. There’s no need to worry about it for the moment.

2. Look to other examples

When building software, there’s no shortage of examples that you can refer to for influence. I’m not suggesting that you take a straight copy of a unique feature for another product, but when designing processes for your application, it can help to look to other examples to see how it is handled already. It’s probably going to be simpler than you first thought. I didn’t even think to initially look towards other examples of how this could be done. I could have saved myself a lot of time.

So there we go. My complications were not as quickly overcome as Jack Sparrow’s complications, but then he doesn’t write code does he?

Yes it's that time again where I consider moving to another blog platform. Over the last few years I've tried Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr, Posterous, Octopress and now I am currently on Squarespace.

The key benefit for me at the moment is that I can have two active blogs sitting on one site without having to separate them into different sub-domains. However I am wondering about merging my two blogs back into one so this isn't a big influence on the decision. What I do want is ease of deployment and a bit more control over my blog.

In the last few weeks I have just about nailed the setup on my favourite text editor and it now doubles up as my main tool for writing in Markdown. Squarespace does support Markdown, but I wish I had an easier way of posting to my blog.

Octopress is calling again, it did have a nice easy way of publishing, but I like the ability to post from the web which Squarespace does allow.

Hmm, a tough decision.

I previously wrote about the importance of maintaining your professional network. Today we're going to talk about the same thing, except in the real world.

I'm not one for attending mass networking events. These events are good if you want to find new contacts or be introduced to someone for the first time, but for existing contacts I prefer a more focused meeting. One to one networking if you like.Let me tell you about my mate John.

We worked together about ten years ago for a software vendor specialising in risk management software for health organisations. I loved the job and I loved working with John. He frequently used mind mapping to discuss problems in our software and always provided a great service to our customers. When we were all made redundant, me and John decided to stay in touch.

Over the last decade, I've met up with John about every four months. When each of us are armed with a coffee and a cake, the conversations goes from family life to careers and technology. We talk about ideas for software products, interesting applications, risk management, decision tools and more. The majority of the conversations always falls back to ideas for risk management and decision tools for the web.

It's a great chance to catch up with a good friend, but it also gives me the chance to find out what's happening in his career, his contacts and whether they are any opportunities for career moves. It's times like this that I appreciate the one to one nature of conversation. The conversation is fast, detailed and always leads to an idea or two. No email, no messaging, no smoke signals. You can't file this meeting away for later like you would an email or message, and then forget about it. While networking through the digital world is necessary, so is meetings like this. Whether it's frequent or not, the chance to find out what's happening, discuss ideas and ventures can always lead to an opportunity to further your career or skills.

The next time you find someone on LinkedIn that you want to connect with, remember the people you currently have in your network. When was the last time you had a one to one meeting with someone who influences you?

Some influential posts that have got me thinking that Twitter isn't really for me anymore.

The current problem with Twitter is not that they’re now trying to make money, it’s that they didn’t have a viable business plan from day one. They’ve turned those kings into serfs that are for sale.

— Twitter: Turning Kings in to Serfs by Curtis McHale

I’m not quite sure if Twitter changed. But it seems to have, for me. And it is far more likely that I have or that I am. It is not currently a place I wish to be. I wish I could tell you why but I’m not sure I have examined it deeply enough.

— On Twitter

Every developer should have a blog - Put yourself out there and make it findable. And still you tweet giving all your life's precious remaining keystrokes to a company and a service that doesn't love or care about you - to a service that can't even find a tweet you wrote a month ago.

— Your Words are Wasted