Matthew Lang

My career has been quite varied when you look at the different sectors I've worked in. NHS, risk management, payroll, retail and technology repair and recycle. I've worked in a number of other different sectors as an ERP developer as well but largely these were for small periods of time where you rarely get a chance find out a lot about the domain of the business.

Since I started freelancing at the start of the year, I've been working largely on public health and information websites for NHS related organisations. Not only do I get to work with my favourite development tools and languages every day but I also get to work in my favourite domain. Health.

I don't know what the attraction is to health but I find it an interesting domain to work in. Providing tools for health organisations to share information with their patients so that they can lead healthier lives is quite rewarding in my view. Over the last couple of moths I've even found myself reading NHS related publications to broaden my knowledge of the work I am doing at the moment. I've never done that for any job that I to have had.

It's got me thinking about whether its worth specialising in health contracts or should I stick to working in different domains to keep things fresh? Working in different domains sure would broaden my experience and there might be another sector that I would be interested in. However health is already such a varied domain that could provide some diversity.

I suppose the real question is this. Which one will allow a steady income of work for the near future?

It's been a while since I went through all the incoming data I receive and did some house keeping on them. Over the last few weeks I've been increasingly adding more and more waves of content that come to me. Anything related to freelancing invariably gets added, but I'm now at the stage where I've spread myself to thin. There's podcasts I haven't listened to in the couple of weeks, books sitting on my reading list that haven't been bought, and RSS feeds that I need to unsubscribe from.

It's time to put up a breakwater.

Books

One technical book. One non-technical book.

That's the rule I employed a few years ago, but in the last year it's been thrown out the window and I've only been reading one book every few months. Part of the reason for this is that I've simply been distracted by other things. Home life, career, finances, programming, gaming, movies and other things have meant that I just haven't read as much. This isn't about limiting what I'm reading, but having more time to read by limiting other distractions.

Podcasts

Since I started freelancing I've been subscribed to a number of podcasts that focus on this topic and on the Ruby programming language. Truth be told, I haven't listened to anything on this topic in the last month. It's merely due to the length of the podcasts themselves. At over an hour each, I find it too long to listen to these. I'll be unsubscribing to all podcasts with the exception of three. I haven't decided which three yet, but I need to put a limit in place here if I'm to get any use out of them.

RSS Feeds

I'm currently sitting at just over one hundred RSS feeds in Feedly. Quite a lot if you ask me. My aim is to get this down to 50. Maybe two or three RSS feeds for each topic and selection of my favourites to take it to 50. I could never completely stop using RSS feeds. I find it such a convenient way of reading good content from my favourite blogs.

Half the feeds I simply skip over these days as I've found that some blogs just aren't that active anymore.

Subscriptions

This is paid subscriptions to things such as Railscasts or Caesura Letters.

I've got a couple of subscriptions in here that I could do without for the moment. Cutting the subscriptions back that I don't need at the moment would give me back time to be doing other things.

One thing I have found though is that the email subscriptions I have can largely replace some of the blogs that I am following. Although this does mean more emails hitting my inbox, but my email is quite healthy these days with everything labeled and routed to the appropriate folder when it arrives in my inbox.

I want to make things

Rather than digesting, I need to be producing. Whether it's a service, product, application or some writing, I'd much rather be making things than reading about what others are doing. In the past I've been guilty of worrying too much about what others think and maybe distracted myself with a dig into what's in my RSS feeds that day. Maybe it's time to get over that and simply produce something that will intentionally make people think.

I find it increasingly tiresome to apologize for my need to be alone to recharge, for reasons that echo why many women are tired of educating men about equality.

— If you want to get everything done, leave an introvert alone. by Pete Forde

I do my best work when I'm on my own and I'm disconnected. I'm not alone in this.

Be sure to click through for a couple of great posts that Pete mentions, especially Susan Cain's TED talk on the subject.

Getting informed is a means to an end, not an end in itself. And life’s too short for bad information.

— A new system for reading by Roberto Estreitinho

Roberto's post was the catalyst for me to step back from subscribing to so many sources of content. Glad to be doing a cull now.

My fixie tends to be a fair weather bike these days, but the weather in Scotland is so unpredictable that it might be worth investing in these Pedal Consumption themed SmartAss mudguards.

via Pedal Consumption

I've just finished Seth Godin's book, Poke the Box and one thing has become abundantly clear. I'm not poking the box enough.

I've got a list of product ideas sitting on my desk and so far I've barely started three of them. In each case I've made the minimum number of steps to get each product idea started, but there needs to be more. There needs to be more poking.

Whether it's a prototype, a mock up or even beta version of the product, I need to get these product ideas out there. No excuses.

Matt Gemmell has an excellent post on the community that has built up around App.Net and why he'd like you to consider joining.

The practical effect, which I notice daily, seems to be that people are more willing to participate in conversations, and also more careful about how they express themselves. Such a broad generalisation has no hope of being true for everyone, but it’s been my consistent perception during the months I’ve been using the service.

— App.Net for conversations by Matt Gemmell

Content is king. I hear this a lot when people refer to what drives the popularity of their blog. Which is okay when your blog is targeted as a specific audience, but does the same rule apply when your blog is personal?

Let me re-phrase that. Is your blog for you or your readers?

I've been very much of the mind that my blog has an audience. Not a specific audience but an audience all the same. My audience likes what I write. Since moving to Octopress though, I have been struggling about what to do with the content of my tumblelog. My heart says to include all the content here, but my head says no.

My tumblelog is a mixed bag of stuff including fixies, tech news and an assortment of links to my favourite posts on the blogs that I like to read. I like posting these things as it's what I like, but I'd still like to continue with a daily essay style post.

One way to maintain two audiences but in the same blog is to provide another RSS feed for readers to subscribe to. One feed will default to only the daily posts that I write while another feed will provide the full assortment of posts to enjoy. This way I hope to blog for myself but also keep the interest of readers in mind by not polluting their feed with posts they don't want to read.

If you continue to enjoy the daily posting routine of myself then stick with the current RSS feed. If you want something more varied then why not think about subscribing to the full assortment of stuff I'll be posting? The new feed will be ready early next week and of course I'll be posting the details here.

Being a parent is tough at the best of times, but being a parent, holding down a job and working on anything else that takes your fancy is hard too. As a developer I like tinkering with code and ideas, but these aren't a priority and so I only work on side projects when I can. However, even short bursts of coding can be productive as John Polacek points out:

It has happened to me over and over again. I get away from what I’m working on, then when I come back, I focus on it in a fresh way. I can accomplish in 10 minutes what may have taken me an hour or more had I just stayed ‘heads down’.

— How Getting Married and Having Kids Made Me a Better Programmer by John Polacek

My focus is family first, income second and then everything else. So only when I have exhausted all my options about the house do I crack open my text editor and start coding. I might only get 10 minutes or half an hour, but it's all I need to move project forward.

The surprise for me is that I thought that with freelancing I would be able to set aside some time for side projects, but the priority for freelance work is to simply save what I can. When the work stops coming in for a short spell, then I can focus on my side projects for a period of time until I find other work. For the moment though I'm happy to only work on side projects when I can.