Matthew Lang

... every day.

A must read.

I originally read about Leo Babauta's text playlist at the start of the year. The idea is that you keep a list of articles that you read on a regular basis and keep them in easy reach. I was sold.

I wanted to create my own text playlist but the problem I had was that I had hundreds of articles to pick from. My Pinboard account gets links saved to it daily and at the last count I was at just over 1300 saved links. Where do I begin to build my list? Searching through my Pinboard links was going to take time.

I let the idea of a text playlist slide for a while until I came across an article that I wanted to add to my playlist and over the last few months I've browsed through a few tags on Pinboard looking for articles that I've frequently read in the past.

At the start of the week I had a breakthrough. Stef Lewandowski's article on creativity was my first article on the playlist and today I recalled a few other articles of the same high quality that I wanted to add. I love this idea of a highly valued list of articles that you can refer back to on a frequent basis. I like to think of it as my "Best of" from my saved links in Pinboard.

So without further ado, I give you my text playlist.

I have a new hobby, sort of. Last weekend I bought myself a new set of golf clubs and last night I took my oldest son to the driving range for a boys night. He got to fine tune his swing and I got the chance to become familiar with the first set of golf clubs I've had in 20 years. It's sure been a long time since I played a round of golf, so I wasn't sure what to expect with a new set of golf clubs. The surprising thing was that I could actually hit the ball reasonably well.

This new hobby isn't about me though, it's more about my son. Being a great little golfer means I want to get him on the course as often as possible, but access to golf courses for kids isn't easy, especially when you thrown in the unpredictable Scottish weather. Also he's a bit young to be out playing a round on his own.

So I decided to arm myself with some clubs and get into this golf thing with my son. Hopefully over the summer and autumn I can get him onto some public courses near us, but more importantly he can teach Dad how to play golf!

It's come to my attention that I have neglected Journalong in the last few months. I had big plans for Journalong but in the last few weeks I've simply neglected working on it. I should be able to work on Journalong on my own time, but finding that time has been difficult over the past few months. That's no excuse though, but that's really another story.

I only realized how much I had neglected it when an email from the on-line writing service, Draft, arrived with a bundle of new features for users. Reading through the features I realized that I had let Journalong slide for too long.

No matter what size of product or service you run, letting it fall to the wayside for even a few weeks is bad. If you want it to be a success then you need to be gradually improving your product just one bit at a time.

Even if it's only a couple of hours a week, it better to make improvements and ship them rather than waiting for a day where you can do a whole ton of work in one go. That day might not come for a few weeks or months. What if it does come and you end up doing something else? Don't neglect your product.

What's in a name? Quite a lot actually. When I first started freelancing it was my wish to specialise in Ruby and a couple of the more popular frameworks that are built with Ruby, namely Ruby on Rails and Sinatra. Being fresh to freelancing I didn't want to narrow my field down too much either. I still have plenty of experience with the Microsoft .Net languages and frameworks. After considering this I used "Freelance Web Developer" as my title on my website and as part of my bio.

Now though I am re-considering who I am and what I do as a freelancer. I'm coming round to describing myself more as a Ruby on Rails Developer than anything else. Yes it is more focused than what I have done in the past, but it's what I have been working with for the last five months and will continue to do so in the near future.

I never thought that the Rails framework would involve so much. Every day I'm discovering something new about it and I'm really enjoying the experience. For now I'm happy to be marketing myself as a specialist rather than a generalist.

... and armed with productivity tips that get you brilliant at the basics.

.. permission to suck.

Too cute not to post and it even has extension bars for time-trialling.

via FGGT