Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

Opportunities ahead

Bad news.

Got paid off this morning.

Good news.

I now have an opportunity to carve a career that will benefit me. A career that will interest me, let me work on the things that interest me the most.

There's freelancing, contracting, consulting, writing, coding and product building. Lots of opportunities ahead, but decisions need to be made sooner rather than later.

I have a young family to think about, so while I would like to do all the things above, I need to be realistic.

I'm going to start exploring these opportunities one at a time over the next week. No rash emotionally fuelled decisions.

This is an opportunity that can't be missed.

Stop sending 'important' emails

Ever get an email marked as important and then proceeded to wonder why it is so important?

I get them every now and again at work, but what amazes me is that people still send email and mark it as important. Do you really think that little red flag you put on it will automatically kick me into state of tunnel vision, where I stop until the issue in the email is resolved? Be honest, how many times have you received an important email asking you to complete a task and deferred the work to later rather than doing it now. It's not your fault. You know the task is important, but how important is it really? I think we can all agree that most of the time, it's not that important.

Email doesn't convey how important a task is because there is no tone in an email to indicate this. Also, we've lived with email so long now that we question every important email that comes into our inbox. How important is it really?If something is so important why waste the time on an email that may or may not get actioned? That little red flag called 'important' doesn't have any magical powers you know.

If you're about to send an email with a task that you think is important, then stop.

Discard the email and find the phone number of the person you wanted to send that important email to.Phone this person, discuss the task at hand. Provide that person with the all the necessary information that they need to complete the task.

Not only are you conveying how important the task is but you can also clarify any details that you might be asked about it.Next time you're mouse hovers over the important flag, decide whether the task is so important that it warrants a phone call. Most of the time it won't be that important, but when it is important, you'll be glad you conveyed the importance of the task yourself rather than relying on a dumb machine to do it for you.

Why we need side projects

I've always had a side project going for the last few years. Whether it was a blog, a bit of code or some writing, there's always been something there for me to do. The reason why wasn't really clear to me until I read this:

The Grind is the problem that you beat yourself up over solving every single day. It’s the job you’re in, or the business you’re building. The Grind gets our best hours, our fullest attention, and the whole of our willpower.

Which leads me to the this question: If the company or organisation you work for allowed a percentage of time to work on side projects, would the grind become less of a grind?

— The Grind and Why We Need Side Projects by Rocketr

The slow boiled frog ...

... that is every Twitter user at the moment.

A well written post by "love him or loathe him" DHH on how Twitter now amounts to nothing more than a corporate advertising stream backed by a ludicrous amount of funding.

That funding has to be paid back and unfortunately Twitter's users are the ones that are going to pay the price for it.

With every story like this I get closer and closer to deleting my account. I'm so close now to just hitting that 'Delete' button.

Last week seen a spike in traffic to my blog. Looking at the stats, I noticed that most of the traffic was coming from Hacker News (HN). It turns out that Curtis McHale submitted my Simple Tools post to the HN board. He's a braver man than I am, because I would never post my own stuff to HN.

Why? In a word, fear.

Not because of the content or opinion of my own writing, but the way in which I present that content or opinion. Fear that my writing isn't good enough or doesn't communicate my opinion clearly. I'm not a particularly confident person, but the confidence diminishes when it comes to my writing and my code. "What if it's wrong?" is always at the front of my thoughts when I'm writing or coding.I hate failing at something. Well it's actually more like fearing it. I took a step one day and said, "I'm gonna ship this for the world to see". It was the first step towards building up some confidence. Having a web product out there is a great boost to your confidence if you're a programmer, designer or wannabe entrepreneur. It has helped me to build my confidence but I don't feel that it is enough.

My next step is produce more publicly available writing and code for the world to see. I need to commit to writing more often, coding more often.For writing it means blocking out 30 minutes a day to write. Putting something on the blog every day. Allowing people read more about what you have to say. If it's garbage, they'll let you know.

For coding it means a better understanding of the code I am writing and making that code publicly available. Releasing more libraries for other developers to use and let them point out bugs and enhancements.You can only learn your craft from making mistakes along the way and learning from these mistakes. Want to be a better writer? Write more. Want to be a better programmer? Write more code. The confidence will come along the way, or so I am often told!

As for posting my blog posts to HN, I'll leave that to Curtis to do for me while I chip away at the fear with another piece of writing.