Matthew Lang

I've been reading George Leonard's book, Mastery after seeing it recommended by fellow blogger Nicholas Bate. The book has been a real eye-opener in terms of the difference between what I perceived mastery to be and what mastery is.

I like this highlight from the book explains what mastery is:

The people we know as masters don't devote themselves to their skill just to get better at it. The truth is, they love to practice — and because of this they do get better at it.

Take my own career for example, the web developer. I've tried so many times in the past to pick up different languages and experiment with other frameworks, but each time I've rarely got passed the basic steps of a simple application. It's all well and good learning something new, but have I gained the level of knowledge and experience that I should have as a web developer before moving onto mastering other languages and frameworks?

I'll be honest, no. In no area of the stack of tools and technology that a typical web developer uses have I amassed a level of familiarity and knowledge that a master of web developer would have. Am I knowledgable and confident with these tools? Yes, but there's still places where I can improve.

So I'm changing focus. Gone are the plans to try out different languages and frameworks and in are the day to day practicing of the tools that I need to make a living. A relational database (PostgreSQL), a dynamic language (Ruby), a web framework (Ruby on Rails), and there's JavaScript, HTML and CSS. Not only that but there are also skills that I use daily like agile practices and writing that need work. I don't need to master all of these but I am going to focus on a handful over the rest of the year.

I love writing software, but rather than focusing on practicing other languages and frameworks as possibilities for future work, I should focus on practicing with the development tools I enjoy using now. Ruby on Rails has been around for ten years, who's to say it won't be around for another ten years.

And thanks for the book recommendation NB!

AgileBits have announced their new plan for families.

It’s never been easier to share 1Password with your whole family. There’s no sync service to set up, vaults appear automatically, and there’s an Admin Console where you can invite people and manage sharing with your family.

Every family member gets their own copy of 1Password, and their own personal space to store private information. With this, you can give them the tools they need to stay safe without taking away their independence.

— Introducing 1Password for Families

1Password itself is an excellent tool, but this just makes it so much better.

As I'm writing this in my editor in Ghost, the title reads "Social Media Sucks". Yeah, I know. Strong words in that title. I don't like them either, but having them at the top of my editor as I write this actually reminds me of all the great things that social media brings. Here's a few of the positive things I get from Twitter:

• My son's golf course and coaching updates from @paisleypro.
• What's on the grill at the home of @culturaloffering.
• Local news and updates from @paisleyorguk.
• Deep thoughts and revelations from @patrickrhone.

There's so much more as well and from the 300+ accounts I now follow there are so many more that I could list. It's a tailored timeline that I curate to my own needs.

If I don't like something that someone says, then I unfollow.

Disagreeing with someone though is a different thing, and while I might disagree on certain topics with people I follow, it doesn't mean they're wrong and I'm right or vice versa. It's a difference of opinion and that keeps my timeline interesting. I enjoy that.

The worst of Twitter is something that I haven't been personally experienced but I see time and time again. People with a large number of followers become easy targets for the Twitter mob and their flaming torches and pitchforks. The mob that prides itself on correcting every wrong done. The mob that stands for justice and equality. What they actually stand for is easy pickings. They find the easiest wrong to correct and pounce. This is the worst of Twitter and is going to drive people away from the platform.

Stephen Fry was the latest victim of the Twitter mob. I don't blame Stephen Fry for leaving Twitter. I also don't think he overreacted in leaving. He made his decision based on not one past experience but several. It's sad that people are driven to such measures. It makes Twitter a less entertaining place.

I've update the title of this post, to reflect the changing tide of Twitter. I just wish it was more like it was in the beginning.

I love reading posts like this. Discovering how different people tweak the home screens on their smartphones gives you a small indicator to how that person acts and thinks.

Another interesting point is Shawn's decision to use the iPhone 6+.

Another thing with the iPhone 6s Plus is that it somehow managed to take over the spot my iPad used to hold. It was such a sly move I never saw it coming. But somehow, over the course of a few months, I just stopped using my iPad for reading and note taking.

— Apps and Workflows: iPhone (6s Plus) Edition by Shawn Blanc

I'm toying with replacing my current iPhone 6 but the decision to go small with the new iPhone 5SE out in March or go big with an iPhone 6+ still eludes me.

Kurt Harden loves the family life at home and makes it a top priority.

At lunch, I was able to drive home for a sandwich. The kids were off school so Libby and Henry were added to the lunch conversation at the kitchen table and I ran Libby to a friend’s house after lunch. I am fortunate enough to live close to work. The break in my workday often keeps me fresh, adding perspective to problems and opportunities that might otherwise be seen differently.

— Home by Kurt Harden

I'm also lucky to be in a position where I work from our home and I can take the kids to school and nursery and pick them up at the end of their day. Working from home is hard work, but the value in being nearby for the family is too good to give up on.

Ghost's plan to relocate their business to Singapore is a blow to innovative internet businesses in the UK.

Why locate your business in the UK if it's going to suffer EU under a tax regulation that was designed to catch out the giant technology companies?

Nor do the numbers lie. According to the EU VAT Action campaign, HMRC has admitted that 78% of the VATMOSS returns being processed in the UK only bring in 1% of the total revenue they get from this scheme. HMRC have gone so far as to eject 3000 of those small digital businesses out of the MOSS system because their tax revenues are so tiny that they are essentially not worth processing. Yet the scariest number in this whole drama was the Campaign’s finding that only 1% of impacted businesses are even aware of the MOSS requirements. That 1% is fed up struggling under the burdens of a regulation designed to go after multinational corporations whose sweetheart tax deals were brokered by EU politicians in the first place.

— Digital platform Ghost leaves the EU thanks to #VATMOSS by WebDevLaw

Ghost made the right decision in relocating and I wish them all the best in their new digs.

It's stuff like this that just boggles my mind.

Compared with the overall vastness of space, the moon is very close to us: it's just 238,900 or so miles away. But compared with our daily experience, absolutely everything in space is absurdly far apart. In the gap between us and the moon, you could neatly slide in all seven of the other planets — with a bit of room to spare. That includes Saturn and Jupiter, which are about nine and 11 times as wide as Earth, respectively.

— 11 images that capture the incredible vastness of space by Vox

The classic red and yellow colours of team Saeco brings back a few memories of watching Cipo.

via PEDAL Consumption

LinkedIn. The social network for the workplace.

I have something of a lax attitude towards it. I don't share much on it and I rarely search for connections on it. I've even closed my account there, and then a couple of years later I setup my account again. Since then its use for me has gradually tapered off to the point where I'm once again considering deleting my account again.

As a freelancer though I wonder if I'm committing career suicide. I've looked at a number of other web development freelancers in the UK market and they don't always have a LinkedIn profile. They certainly have their own website under their own name or a company name and usually a Twitter account too, but they don't always have a LinkedIn profile. I can only speculate on the reasons for this, but I'd like to think they're great in their field and don't need to use LinkedIn. There could be other reasons though.

So I have a LinkedIn account at the moment but is it essential to have?

Before I decide on whether I should remove it or not I want to talk about why I'm not convinced that LinkedIn is right for me.

No Content Value

I'm not getting any content value from it. Based on the people I follow, few of them post to LinkedIn on a frequent basis. Only a small number of people in my network share content on a frequent basis at LinkedIn but it's the same content I can find elsewhere.

Part of this problem is that I see LinkedIn as a secondary social network. I see Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus and a few others as being primary social networks. They are the first sources I would go to find content. I don't see LinkedIn as being in the same league as these.

This also puts it in the stack of networks that I would question sharing content too. As a secondary social network, I don't share anything there. I already have outlets where people can read my content and conversely where I can read the content of others through Twitter, email and RSS.

So if there's no content on LinkedIn, then I see little need for me to share anything myself.

False Leads

I'm not getting the right leads from it. I often get offers of work for the wrong jobs.

For a number of years I worked as a Dynamics NAV developer. They're a rare breed and are hard to find but even harder to find as being available for hire.

In the last five years I have done about six months of work with Dynamics NAV. So it's fair to say that I'm fairly rusty on the platform and probably out of touch with it. Yet I still get messages in LinkedIn to connect with recruitment consultants to see if I have any interest in Dynamics NAV jobs.

This isn't LinkedIn's fault directly, but the platform they have built has now become a marketplace for recruitment consultants to find people that almost match their client's needs. Often a keyword match will suffice, but based on my recent experience and job title on LinkedIn, I wouldn't imagine that a freelance web developer would be interested in Dynamics NAV work again.

Too Complicated

I'm not a fan of the LinkedIn user interface. It is a busy and complicated website. There's calls to action everywhere you look. Completing your profile, sharing content, connecting with others. It sounds a lot like any other social network, except for LinkedIn their aim is for you to connect with others and build your network. This doesn't translate too well in terms of their user interface and rather than putting the focus on expanding your network they now have calls to action for other features such as sharing content and replying to or actioning content others have posted.

I usually log into LinkedIn on a fortnightly basis. I do a five minute check on messages and invitations and then I'm done. I'm everything that LinkedIn doesn't want in a user. And for that reason I limit my time in using it.

There Are Benefits

So we've looked at concerns I have with LinkedIn but it does have it's benefits.

Seeing recommendations from others is a great way for clients to see your value. It could be easily done on your own branded site by asking clients for recommendations though.

Then there's the skills and endorsements. Now I admit that this is only a mouse click that others do for you. It shouldn't be any kind of benchmark to measure a freelancer's skill set against, but at a quick glance it can be useful to see who has recommended you for what. However the real value in a freelancer is seeing that knowledge first hand and that's why I think it's more important to see a freelancer writing about their experience in their field rather than just relying on this skills and endorsements feature from LinkedIn.

Finally, it is useful to have a network of people that you have worked with and more importantly to have that network separate from other social media accounts you might have. Mixing business and pleasure rarely pays off so it's nice to have a separate network in the form of LinkedIn.

So why not use LinkedIn then?

I don't use LinkedIn for searching for initial contacts for two reasons.

1. I find the invitations process to be too impersonal. Yes I have connections with others I have worked with but this is always with people that I have met in person or exchanged more than my fair share of phone calls or emails with. I don't like the idea of blindly getting invitations to connect on LinkedIn so I don't use them myself unless the person in question is someone I've met or someone I've chatted with on a frequent basis.

2. LinkedIn isn't where I post content so I wouldn't refer potential customers to there to begin with. Instead I would refer potential customers to websites I have worked on and to my own website.

For these two reasons I skip using LinkedIn to find clients. I favour direct contact with people using details from their website. Sure it might be a more manual process than searching for clients on LinkedIn and then inviting each one to connect, but tailoring each phone call and email to each potential clients shows a bit more effort to get to know that potential client.

What's the replacement to LinkedIn then?

So I've filled you in about my opinions on LinkedIn, but if I'm not using LinkedIn, then how do I network? How do I market myself? How do I reach people?

Glad you asked.

When it comes to my freelance business I don't measure it in terms of the number of connections I have, I measure it by how much work I have planned in the next six months. If the schedule is full, the business is doing well, if not then I need to find more business. It's simple. There are a number of other reasons as well, but for the overall view of the business it's easy for me to assess my position by how much work I have planned in the near future.

If I was going to close my LinkedIn account then I would need to find suitable replacements for each of the features that LinkedIn has. I already have a number of these setup .

Profile and Content

Right, let's get the obvious one out of the way. You need a website for your profile and marketable content.

That's easy. Get yourself a domain and a blog.

For a long time I has a single blog under my own name, but it was difficult to separate personal and work posts. So at the end of last year I decided to start trading under the name of DigitalBothy. I have a site for it now and a number of posts there that features the type of work I do. It's early days for it and I wish I did this from the start but better late than never.

I have plans to make an about and contact page there so that I can easily separate leads from other messages to this site. I do get the odd question about programming and other topics on my personal website and I'm glad to help out and reply when I can but for freelance work I like to have a separate website for this.

Last year I got more referrals and work through the contact form on my own personal website than I did through LinkedIn. My LinkedIn profile might have helped but the fact that most leads came through my own website is hard to ignore.

Contacts

I need to manage my contacts. I don't use the term network here as networking is the action of contacting people. As a freelancer I need to do more than just contact people.

I use phone, email, RSS and social networks to keep abreast of potential clients and industry news. I use phone calls and emails to find out about the position of clients and potential clients and whether they would be in need of my services. I also use email, RSS and social networks to monitor potential clients to see if there are opportunities potentially available or if their situation changes e.g. any recent investments or changes in company direction.

I use Highrise to manage contact with my clients and leads. It's a relatively new addition to my list of freelancing tools, but I have had a CRM in one form or another but the decision to move to Highrise is because it has a number of features that I benefit from.

I keep all client notes, emails and documents in a feature that Highrise calls a "case". I have one for each client. Keeping everything together makes it easier to search for client details, deliverables in an email or a deadline that a client has mentioned.

Highrise also has great integration with email which means that I can redirect client emails to Highrise by just including the dropbox email for each client. I also use Mail to redirect incoming email from clients to Highrise as well.

This is where LinkedIn falls short for me as a tool for my freelance business. LinkedIn has the tools to create and grow your network but that's where it ends. I could use LinkedIn's own tools to message clients, but LinkedIn isn't a true CRM or an easily accessible platform to find my content.

With my own tools I can start building my profile, marketing myself with content and make connections with clients and leads to help keep my freelance business ticking over. And it's working well for me.

So do I need LinkedIn as a freelancer?

Probably not. It offers little to me in terms of value other than being a network tool, but networking involves more than just clicking buttons. True networking is face to face meetings, phone calls, emails and going to events. Sure it's nice to sit behind a desk and search for potential clients on LinkedIn but the true value comes from searching for those potential clients out in the field and tailoring your introduction to each of them. It comes from marketing your valuable skills in the best way possible and with case studies to back it up.

Still I can't help but think that closing my LinkedIn account is wrong to do, but only because it has become commonplace to have one. For many it is necessary to have one, but LinkedIn's value to me is questionable.

I'm still on the fence about closing my LinkedIn account, but in the meantime I will be tailoring it towards what I do now as a freelancer and relying on it less in the future.

I definitely want one of these.

Someday, civilization will collapse. It is with that knowledge that a group of Russians — who might know more than most about the perils of that collapse — have built the Sherp. It's an all-terrain vehicle that can easily climb over barriers more than 2 feet high. Water is no obstacle, making it truly all-terrain. Oh, and it can be yours for less than $70,000.

Some Russians have built the perfect apocalypse survival vehicle by The Verge

An amazing illustrated guide to Stephen Hawking's wonderful second Reith lecture on black holes.

A new game on the PS4 and PC that puts you in the role as a fire lookout in a national park in Wyoming. It's caught my attention due to its wonderful graphics and a different approach to gameplay.

The perfect analogy of the relationship between Twitter and the user's of Twitter.

I don't think it's terrible or the end of the world. Life in a silo where you and I are the product. McDonald's doesn't ask the chickens whether they like the options for Chicken McNuggets. A similar thing. The main difference is the chicken probably couldn't say. Humans have opinions, feel disempowered, not heard, not loved, bored, and we like to be consulted. A good shitstorm provides temporary relief for all these ills. So for a while, venting, then life goes back to the normal humdrum.

— Twitter's new timeline? by Dave Winer