I missed some glorious golfing weather over the weekend as I finished painting the hall. With that done, all our major home decorating plans are complete, and I can enjoy the outdoors and golf until around October.
Picked up a couple more of these notebooks from Atoms to Astronauts.
Good quality paper and the covers are superb. Picked up the astronomy and geology notebooks this time.
They’re catching on in the Lang household as my youngest asked for a couple as well.
Spring, the planning season
A recent trend in my RSS feeds and newsletters is that March is a month for preparing and planning and is the start of a seasonal way of implementing those plans.
Seth Godin recently blogged about March being the strategy month.
But March? Around the world, March can be a chance to get down to the work we committed to do.
Invest 31 days into outlining, discussing and fleshing out the strategy you want to bring to your career or your project. It doesn’t matter how fast you’re going if you’re headed in the wrong direction.
Mike Vardy also wrote in his newsletter that if you feel left behind, don’t worry.
If you’ve been feeling behind, let me be clear: you’re not behind—you’re right on time. This is your moment to decide—what do you want this year to really be about?
Finally, Austin Kleon also discussed living seasonally in his newsletter. Now is the time to plant those ideas for the year ahead. Austin Kleon’s newsletter got me thinking about how March is the month for starting a new one—not with resolutions, but with plans.
New Year’s resolutions used to be a thing for me, but I never saw them through. I would get a few weeks in every year, and my resolutions would fall by the wayside. After a time, I gave up on the notion that January would be the start of something new.
The problem with resolutions is that they are decisions that are attempted at the change of a day, and they are made when most of us are getting over the last of the holidays. It can be challenging to make adjustments and see decisions through. You need more time to prepare and see those decisions through.
March is traditionally a time for planting in the garden. Just last weekend, we started planting our tomato and chilli seeds. Next weekend, we’ll look to start planting flowers and herbs. I also have some plans to put a permanent greenhouse in the garden instead of the plastic ones I have been using.
Next weekend, I will start building a base for the greenhouse to sit on, and hopefully, by April, I’ll have a more permanent place for growing through the summer.
While our plans for the garden will take time, they will yield results with time and care throughout the summer and into the autumn.
I’ve got other plans for this year outside of the garden. These plans will take time, but using the year’s seasons is a better way of planning for the year ahead. I will use the next few months to get some plans in place, both for in and outside the garden.
I finished reading Dust, the last of the Silo series by Hugh Howey.
I thoroughly enjoyed the books. It’s also good to finally have finished a series of books, as it’s been a while since I’ve done that.
The wee yin had a good lesson today working on his short game. I hope he remembers it all for tomorrow when he plays his winter knockout tie.
First Paragraph - Dust
Dust rained in the halls of Mechanical; it shivered free from the violence of the digging. Wires overhead swung gently in their harnesses. Pipes rattled. And from the generator room, staccato bangs filled the air, bounced off the walls, and brought to mind a time when unbalanced machines spun dangerously.
‐ Dust by Hugh Howey
I’m loving this series of books.
Last year, I relocated my office to the back of our home with a south-facing window. I now use light themes more frequently when the sun is bright during the day. The Noctis set of themes for VS Code is ideal if you’re looking for light and dark themes in a single extension. Recommended.
Less-than estimation
Chris Done’s estimation method is brilliant because it allows for flexibility and grows with the complexity of what you are estimating.
I call it “less than estimation” because if a given piece of work is obviously under an hour, your estimate is <hour. If it’s not obvious, you bump it up to <day. If it doesn’t obviously fit within a day, bump it up to a <week. If you’re not sure it’ll fit into a week, my experience says that it could take even three weeks, so bump it up to <month.
This should also work well with your preferred task manager if it allows you to use tags to add meta-data to tasks.
Trying to stop making daily trips between VS Code and GitHub and handle pull request work within VS Code when I can.
I’m ending the week on a high with my wife’s birthday today. My wife is off to yoga this morning, and then we’ll spend a couple of hours in the garden, preparing it for the good weather. Finally, I’ll be cooking the birthday girl’s requested dinner, which is one of her favourites, chicken pie.
The wee guy wanted nachos for dinner. Combine that with some salsa and guacamole, and that’s a pretty good dinner. Definitely one of my favourites.
I didn’t think they would follow Jurassic World Dominion with another movie in the franchise, but hey, dinosaurs! I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t interested in seeing this.
I see Paper Apps at the top of Hacker News (snapshot courtesy of the HN snapshot tool). I’m sure this has been posted to Hacker News before, but I’m glad to see it surface again.
As much as I love paper and pen, web versions of these apps would be good, but I can see the appeal of the notepads.
Building my own technology radar with SVG
When I was freelancing, one of the things I did regularly was read the ThoughtWorks Technology Radar. It’s a snapshot of the different technologies that ThoughtWorks is considering and using. As a freelancer, I found it a good read as it provided a glimpse of what was happening in the web development industry. Once I started working full-time again, I stopped reading it and didn’t revisit it for a few years.
My current role is senior software engineer, but I am working towards the next role up from this one. This involves expanding my role in several ways, including learning and adopting new technologies and processes. One way I thought I could do this was to set up my own technology radar. ThoughtWorks does offer a means to run your own technology radar, but I wanted my own technology radar to be more straightforward.
Armed with my new knowledge of using SVG over the last couple of years, I decided to start building a technology radar of my own.
My technology radar comprises two layers of quadrants, the smaller quadrants on top of the bigger ones, to achieve the effect of having an outer trial quadrant and an inner adopt quadrant. I used the path element to do this.
<path d="M 10 45 A 40 40 0 0 1 45 10 L 45 25 A 30 30 0 0 0 25 45 Z" fill="#e3f2fd" stroke="#2196f3" stroke-width="0.5"/>
<path d="M 20 45 A 25 25 0 0 1 45 20 L 45 45 Z" fill="#e8f5e9" stroke="#4caf50" stroke-width="0.5"/>
The tokens representing the different individual items are simply circles and text elements nested under a group tag so that I can group all the items together.
<g transform="translate(40, 35)">
<title>TDD</title>
<circle cx="0" cy="0" r="2" fill="#4caf50"/>
<text font-weight="bold" x="0" y="0.5" font-size="1.5" text-anchor="middle" fill="#fff" font-family="Arial, sans-serif">2</text>
</g>
I added a title tag to each token to achieve a hover effect with a text description of the token.
Finally, I added labels to the middle of the quadrant to indicate the two sections and each corner to indicate the type of technologies grouped in that quadrant.
I haven’t figured out how to programmatically group tokens in each quadrant with code, so for the moment, I am using SVG Viewer to place tokens in each quadrant by hand.
I have published a GitHub Gist of the technology radar with blank tokens filled in for one of the quadrants. Feel free to fork this technology radar for your own needs.
You can find my own technology radar here. I’ll be updating it as the year progresses.
First Paragraph - 12 Rules for Life
If you are like most people, you don’t often think about lobsters—unless you’re eating one. However, these interesting and delicious crustaceans are very much worth considering. Their nervous systems are comparatively simple, with large, easily observable neurons, the magic cells of the brain. Because of this, scientists have been able to map the neural circuitry of lobsters very accurately. This has helped us understand the structure and function of the brain and behaviour of more complex animals, including human beings. Lobsters have more in common with you than you might think (particularly when you are feeling crabby—ha ha).
— 12 Rules for Life by Jordan B. Peterson
First non-fiction book of the year. Just reading a chapter a month.
Joan Westenberg’s post on going viral has this little gem that could be considered a mantra for those who want a more sustainable path to building something.
Build for the minimum viable audience. Create work that matters for people who care. Focus on depth over distribution. Let your ideas spread through trust networks instead of trending algorithms.
I love that Bookshop.org still supports local bookstores with their new ebook sales. However, why can you only read these ebooks with the Bookshop.org Ebooks app? I would have liked the option to read my purchased ebooks in other ebook readers. Still, I’ll be checking it out.
My now page is updated. Projects haven’t moved much since the start of the month, but I am glad to have finished two books.