Web developer amongst other things
... on Planet Earth. Let's start with the first one.
Celebrate more often: you've got a place on the planet, the one consistently rated the best in the known universe. Don't let a day go by without remembering that. That irritating e-mail is just a tiny grain of sand in the enormity of it all.
— 22 Things to Do on Planet Earth by Nicholas Bate
21 more things to do courtesy of NB.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For six months now I've been writing my morning pages every weekday morning. The idea of morning pages is to write three pages of longhand writing every day. Weekends are precious in our house, so until the boys are more independent in the morning I chose to just write during the week.
So far I've been mostly consistent. There has been the odd weekly break every month, and there's some days I've been too rushed to do it. I have written morning pages on more days than not over the past six months though, so I think that's quiet an accomplishment.
The tools of the exercise are a pen and notebook.
Right now I'm using a Lamy Safari fountain pen and Volant Moleskine notebooks. The Lamy is great for this exercise as I find it comfortable to hold. I choose the Volant notebooks as I wanted a notebook that would last me more than a month but still be comfortable to write in. It does the job well.
Today marks the start of the fourth notebook. I'll be reviewing my writing over the last few months to see what's fit for publishing. It's not all gold, but there's the odd gem in there, and that's exactly the whole point of this exercise for me. To get some writing in and find the stuff that's worth telling the world about.
I seen this very nice wallet on Tools and Toys and the first thing I thought was, "There's no place to slide in a small pen like my Fisher".
Complete. Pen. Snob.
Update: I stand corrected. There is one!
Anyone got any pointers to finding topics to blog about from a web dev perspective?
I love this idea of paying a subscription fee for using Twitter, but I fear that it might be too late for Twitter.
Before you scream at me to tell me I’m a dope for suggesting this to Twitter, let me give you this tease: Like anything in this world, in the most efficient economies, you get what you pay for. There’s a bright side in paying and that’s a better user experience. It’s why there are so many apps in the Apple Store that have a regular version, which you get for free, and a Pro version, which you pay for.
— My $4.5 Billion Gift To Twitter by Darren Rovell
I've not been a fan of the whole Twitter experience since signing up again and I'm getting little in value from it. This is largely because the people I follow (who were regular tweeters in the past) are no longer that active. There are some benefits, but most days I never check my timeline and instead steer towards a couple of curated lists I have.
There's little doubt that the world wants free online services. Darren Rovell's poll on Twitter might not be completely unbiased as it was conducted on Twitter, but the results of the poll are clear. People want free stuff.
When it comes to online services and apps, I tend to favour those that come with subscription plans or a one-off cost for a license. Why? Well, because I want to support the team behind the software and the money they get from me helps towards keeping that service alive and running.
The pitfall of a free service though is that once you've dug that pit and put a sign up saying it's "It's free!", everyone wants to jump in. It then becomes hard to get those people back out and into paying for the service.
There are exceptions to this rule, such as companies that offered the right incentives to get customers to pay or services that rely on ads to subsidise the free service. These are the exceptions though and success in their service doesn't means that others using the same method will be successful as well.
Traditional businesses (retail e.g.) never give anything away for free. You always pay for something. It's simple numbers. If you want something you have to pay for it. More and more online services are realising this and bootstrapping their service from the beginning. It's good to see. I just wish more of the services that I love to use online would have stayed clear of the "It's free" pitfall from the beginning.
With current trends towards front end frameworks and micro-services, it's refreshing to see advice that goes against these trends in software development. Applies to more than just software development as well you know.
When starting an application your goal should be to ship a MVP (minimum viable product) as fast as reasonably possible while still maintaining quality. To help make that successful you need to be minimal. Evaluate if you really need to start with a front-end framework or if you can get by with static HTML and JavaScript where needed. Build a monolith instead of starting with microservices to avoid the unnecessary overhead that affects development, infrastructure, and team productivity. In every situation you encounter, ask yourself if what you’re trying to do is really necessary.
— Start Simple by Thoughtbot
The recent release of the Raspberry Pi 3 and now Western Digital's new dedicated PiDrive makes the argument for buying a couple of Pi 3s even more compelling.
The 314GB drive, which will normally cost $45.81 but is currently available for $31.42, is a 7mm-high drive based on the basic Western Digital Blue drives that still ship in many budget and mid-end laptops and PCs. The difference is the interface, which has been changed from SATA to USB and is designed to connect to the Pi directly without drastically increasing the footprint of the device. WD says it has customized the drive in order to "reduce the electrical power load of the hard drive on Raspberry Pi while still maintaining sufficient performance to deliver maximum USB data transfer rate." It's also a cheaper solution than the 1TB PiDrive kit the company already sells for $79.99.
— Western Digital makes a $46, 314GB hard drive just for the Raspberry Pi by arstechnica
A fantastic write up of your average day being tracked.
A couple of weeks ago I went to the local shopping centre looking for a thermometer. After entering one store upon leaving without buying anything a tracker was assigned to me. I didn’t think much of it at first, but he followed me dutifully around the shopping centre, took careful note of how I walked. Whenever I visited a store he made a note in his little black book (he kept calling it my profile, and he didn’t want to show me what was in it so I assume it was actually his, rather than mine). Each of those stores of course assigned trackers to me as well and soon enough I was followed by my own personal veritable posse of non-descript guys with little black books making notes.
— Trackers by Jacques Mattheij
These are the actions that could change your world.
Forget the bold gesture. Don't bank on the big project. Focus instead on the little daily actions, the ones that are so small and routine that they are barely noticed.
Those are the actions that are more likely to shape, for good or ill, your future.
— Little Things by Michael Wade
A great post about how the concentration of power in journalism now lies with technology providers and social media platforms.
Social media and platform companies took over what publishers couldn’t have built even if they wanted to. Now the news is filtered through algorithms and platforms which are opaque and unpredictable. The news business is embracing this trend, and digital native entrants like BuzzFeed, Vox and Fusion have built their presence on the premise that they are working within this system, not against it.
— Facebook is eating the world by Columbia Journalism Review
I finally finished William Zinsser's On Writing Well last night.
I've been making slow progress through it due to the fact I read it last thing at night and only managed a few pages at a time.
I've been chewing through a number of books on writing ever since I read Stephen King's book, On Writing. Educating myself on writing is just as important as my continual learning of software development, which is why I spend the time I do reading books like this.
I didn't take as many notes as I probably should have done, but I've queued the book up again on my reading list so that I do take notes on it the second time around. The main reason I enjoyed the book is that it doesn't focus on non-fiction writing.
I was glad to see there was even a section on writing about science and technology including this gem of advice:
Describing how a process works is valuable for two reasons. It forces you to make sure you know how it works. Then it forces you to take the reader through the same sequence of ideas and deductions that made the process clear to you.
— On Writing Well by William Zinsser
I recommend this book for anyone interested in improving their writing regardless of the form it takes. This book won't make you a successful published author but it will make look at your writing in a more critical way and that's not a bad thing if you want to improve.
I love the possibilities that “rails new” brings. So many things we can build.
Ulysses is now out for the iPhone. Having used it on my MacBook for a couple of weeks, I might still be swayed by the shininess of a new tool, although it is one of the best writing tools I've used.
I'm still on the fence about using my phone for writing though, but if it writing on your iPhone is your thing, it may be worth checking out.
I call Ulysses a writing environment, though not really a publishing environment (more on that in a bit), because you're surrounded with a rich set of writing tools. Put another way, it's one of the very few apps that feels relatively complete. That doesn't mean it isn't finished or there's nothing left to fix or add. It's more that Ulysses leaves me with the fewest questions, frustrations, and frictions of any writing app I've used.
— Review: Ulysses 2.5 for iPad and, now, iPhone by MacStories
I like the idea of the Freewrite, but I would never buy one. It creates a sense of being a distraction free writing tool, but you could still check your phone, which is probably with you 99% of the time anyway.
There is a simpler solution.
It doesn't require you to carry a clunky box or even a dedicated bag. It doesn't depend on any electrical power supply. It's completely disconnected from the Internet and it doesn't require you to press any buttons.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the pen and notebook.
An axe review with no mention of its use for taking down the odd zombie.
Rick Grimes would not approve.
Thanks NB!
To watch a demo of a reporting server tool being used to embed a report I have to sign in to the website to watch the video. Why?
ISVs that invoke insane levels of protection on the demoing of their products are closing the door on potential customers everyday.
Are ISVs like this so paranoid about their product that they have to restrict access to videos that demo the features of their product?
