Family guy and web developer
After the ice storm that hit the Toronto area before Christmas, I managed to get a few shots of the fields across the road from my in-laws house just as the sun was setting. These were taken over two days which explains the change in the clouds.
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.
via FGGT
via Kottke.org
And the boundaries just got pushed even further for bike tricks.
via Kottke.org
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!
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
This time the nicely titled, "How to be more intelligent 101". Essential reading from NB.
