Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

Time to regroup

The last few weeks have seen my writing tail off from the schedule I would have preferred to keep. It's meant that I've resorted to writing posts on the day they are supposed to be published. Hardly ideal, but those are the breaks in life.

Right now seems like a good time to take a break for a few weeks over the holidays and regroup. I'll still be posting links to here and maybe the odd written post once a week, but I'll be relaxing my writing schedule until the start of next year.

See you all on the other side!

My First Year Freelancing

The start of next year will mark my one year anniversary as a freelance web developer. It's been an amazing ride this last year. I can't believe I'm still doing what I am doing. Working from home, flexible hours and of course working with Ruby on Rails are all great benefits but what's it been really like?

Clients

As for the client roster I'm dealing with just a handful of clients at the moment. The clients I have I can a manage at the moment and I haven't got to the stage where I would be looking for another developer to sub-contract work to. It has been at the back of my mind the last few days with the amount of work I have lined up for next year, but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

I've managed to build a nice relationship with the clients I have at the moment. I would be the first to say that I'm not really a people person, but the feedback I've had from clients has been excellent. I think being in constant communication is key to building a great relationship with clients.

Work

The work itself has all been Ruby on Rails work. All the applications I am working on are 3.x applications but I have rolled out a couple of Rails 4 applications of my own just to see any differences so that I can prepare for any upgrades I may have to do in the near future.

I do all back end development work. I don't do any design work or front end development at all. It's amazing the number of people who think I do the design work. A designer I am not but I am looking to expand to doing some front end development work next year. It's important to be not only providing value for clients but also providing options. If I can provide additional services that they would go to someone else for then that benefits

Adjustments

I've had to make a number of small adjustments to my daily work routine in order to survive working from home.

I keep to a 9 to 5 work day purely for the fact that it works well for not just me but everyone in the house as well. What's the point in me working all evening and missing spending time with my family? However I do have to sometimes do work at night, maybe once a week. Things like invoicing and admin work I do at night so as not to split my time on client work during the day. It's extra work that needs to be done.

Jen works half days on a Thursday and a Friday. When she comes home with our youngest son on those days, we have a chat about our day so far and have some lunch. Then I retreat back to the office to finish my work for the rest of the day. She understands the importance of me finishing my work for the day and I only get interrupted by Jen if something is really urgent.

An adjustment I've recently made is no client work on a Friday. I made this decision so that I could get some time to work on side projects and hopefully turn them into income streams. Client work is important but my freelance business will need to weather the ups and downs of demands for my work. In order to get through those hard times it makes sense to have other income streams from products.

Benefits

Working for myself is a real benefit to me at the moment. We have a young family with one at school and one at nursery. With myself and Jen both working child care has always been an issue. Up to last year though we were quite fortunate in our circumstances but if I continued working full-time we would definitely need to consider child care for both our kids, which at the time was an expense we were hoping to avoid.

Working for myself though means that I am able to be more flexible in my hours. I still do a 9 to 5 day most days, but having the option there to take my oldest son to school and pick him up means that we only pay child care for our youngest. I always catch up on work at night if I need to but it's usually only an hour or two which leaves me time to spend with my family.

Drawbacks

I'm usually quite good working on my own, but I do miss the banter of working in a development team. Not just the chance to work with others but also the banter, the jokes and the other perks that come from being part of a team. That's the only drawback to my freelance career so far. I can live with working on my own. The benefits far outweigh this one drawback.

A Great Year

It's been a great year working for myself. It's always been something I've wanted to do, but the opportunity just hasn't been there in the past. Now that I've completed a year working solo, I'm prepared to put the work in to maintain my freelance career as long as I can. It just offers so many more benefits than a full-time position. I'm looking forward to writing another post like this at the end of next year. It's going to be hard work but it's going to be enjoyable hard work.

Capturing. It's an action that I repeat every day. Although I don't have exact figures for it, I probably manage about fifty captures a day depending on the context of the capture. Bookmarks, snippets, thoughts, images, posts, code and more. They're all captured into various places and then reviewed, read or actioned on at a later date. Here's a few examples of the things I'm capturing during the day.

Thoughts and ideas

I'm now getting into the habit of journaling about four times a day. Through the day I'll capture ideas, thoughts and challenges that I've faced. I might come across an idea for a small application or I'll make a note about a bit of work that needs to be automated. It like a private social feed back to myself. At the end of the day is my review of the day. I do this every day.

Web pages

Web pages get captured in three places at the moment. The first place is Evernote. Anything that's interesting on App.net is starred. I have a recipe on IFTTT that reads my favourited posts from my timeline there and posts them to my Evernote account.

The second place is the Safari Reading List. I moved for this from Instapaper a few weeks ago. This tends to be for posts that I've found interesting in Feedbin and would like to look at later on.

The third and last place is my private bookmarking application. A couple of months back, I decided to roll my own bookmarking application. It's far from complete but it serves it's purpose for the moment.

Actions

Actions are still a work in progress. Previously I would capture all actions in TaskPaper and then during my weekly review, assign them to a list. For reasons I mentioned in another post, I decided to switch to Todoist for all my list management needs. Anything that requires actioning is added here to the inbox list so that I can assign it to a project or folder during my weekly review.

Emails

This wouldn't be a capture post unless I wrote about my inbox. I tend to keep my inbox fairly clutter free. I carefully vet email subscriptions on a monthly basis and I use a lot of rules that shuffle emails about to various folders. I don't think of my email as multiple inboxes, I tend to view as just one. I have the keyboard navigation pretty much memorised so that I can switch from one folder to another and read and organise emails as I need too.

Most of the emails I do receive are either deleted or filed away on folders, but for a small percentage of them though I forward them onto Evernote. After losing a few important emails a couple of months ago, I've decided to invest in Evernote as a place for important information that I can't afford to lose.

Still too many inboxes

One thing that has become clear from these captures that I do the most is that I still have too many inboxes to maintain. All in I'm sitting at five inboxes at the moment. That's still too many for me.

In a perfect world I would have one inbox that is connected to all the other products and services that I use and lets me move and organise items according to their context, but that's an idea for another day.

At the moment, I think the best I can do is identify a place where I capture the most items and make it integrate with other inboxes with some kind of automated workflow. I can do this easily enough with the tools I have on my MacBook Pro possibly using scripts, but the challenge will be making this work on my iPhone or iPad.

Mark your calendars for next year, Patrick Rhone is proposing a new holiday for journal fans everywhere, Journal Day (December the 9th).

There are many ways to celebrate or traditions one could keep to mark the day. For instance, this might be the day to take out previous journals and reflect on where you were then versus where you are today. Another tradition may be to let someone you trust read one you have kept and get to know the “real” you.

— Journal Day by Patrick Rhone

Column space is a prize piece of real estate in a newspaper. In a medium that is restricted by physical size and print run, editors need to select the stories that will interest readers and will of course sell more newspapers.

Unfortunately the same can't be said for a newspaper's modern incarnation, the website for the newspaper. Pages are cheap to put together and publish. News stories ranging from the headline news of the day that affects the whole world to celebrity spats on social media. It seems as if there is no check in place to say whether a story is worthy of being published. All too often, even the most ridiculous of stories get published.

I'm writing this because people that comment on whether a story is worth the column space on a newspaper's website tend to forget or not know that website pages are cheap when compared to the printed word on a dead tree.

Newspapers are restricted to a set number of pages and for a limited time. There's also the printing costs and shipping costs in getting all these newspapers around the country. Even the smallest of stories have to justify their worthiness to be printed in the final edition of the newspaper for the following day.

Now look at a news website. Technology today can now scale websites to millions of visitors a month on platforms that are readily available to many. A typical news website will be continually updated throughout the day. Every hour sees the addition of more news stories and existing ones being updated with new information if they are still relevant.

Even news with the smallest confirmed information is published with breaking news on a story being published so that so that news website can say, "Yeah, we're investigating this story too".

As more details on these stories come through, they are quickly expanded into more details pieces with links to other related stories and sometimes even interactive maps or graphs are added. There is simply no limit to the column space that a news website has. It's is always growing as along as it is relevant.

Then there's the column space on the front page of a newspaper. Reserved only for the big stories of the day, it was once the coveted part of the newspaper where many journalists want to see their story being published.

The news website is a little less precious though about what makes front page news or in this case, home page news. The home page has become a carousel of stories that are always in a state of change. Developing stories are pushed to the top portion of the page, with other stories eventually tailing off to the bottom. Where newspapers in the past only published a handful of stories on their front page, news sites can easily accommodate over 50 different stories on their home page.

There's no rule now in saying what makes the cut for published news. The idea of column space is dead. News now moves at such a frantic pace that news sites change every minute depending on what's happening around the world. News websites just want to be seen to be reporting the news that happening now rather than reporting the news that is relevant or important.

What if there was a news website that respected the fixed number of pages they had available and only reported on the news that mattered? What if it remained static for 24 hours and only updated once a day? Would you read it?

That's the problem though, no one wants a news website like that. The majority of us expect the news to be updated on a minute by minute basis and within easy reach on any one of the computers or devices they happen to be near at the time.

Column space was once treasured, but sadly it has been replaced by the rule that a story can be published if that story is relevant or might bring more visitors to that newspaper's website. It's that last part that irks me, as it appears to be the guiding factor on many published news stories that are just not relevant with what's happening in the world today.

I'll sign off now, as I'm running out of my column space of 750 words.

My blog archive goes as far back as 2009. A single post on a suggestion for Google Reader is all I can show for that year. In 2010, I wrote two posts, then in 2011 I wrote some more. My early blog posts might have lacked content and aim, but it was a start. It's crossed my mind today that many of these posts are no longer relevant or readable and therefore could be deleted.

Should I delete any posts just because I thought they were inferior?

Absolutely not.

My blog archive is my digital timeline, it's not a complete history, but I'm getting more and more consistent with my posts and I'm frequently writing from a reflective angle. My archive is me through the years. A scrapbook of my thoughts on various topics. I might not have liked what I wrote in the past but I leave it there as a reminder. When I compare what I am writing about today with what I wrote about in the past, it lets me see I am getting better at putting my thoughts into words.