Matthew Lang

It’s coming up for a year since I started my Tweetbot subscription, and now that it’s up for renewal, I’ve decided to pass on renewing it for the next 12 months.

Over the last year, I’ve been gradually finding myself using Twitter’s web interface a lot and their iOS app on my iPhone. The Twitter client has come under fire a lot over the years, but I find both their web interface and iOS app very easy on the eye, and they don’t present too much information at once. Also, now that I can change Twitter to see the latest tweets from my timeline, I no longer need a third-party app to do this for me.

I’ve also been using Tweetdeck on the odd occasion as another option. If I’m looking to follow my timeline and a couple of lists at the one time, I’ll use this. I have enabled the beta preview, which adds many new features.

While Twitter can be a time-sink, I’m gradually getting it to a place where I only check-in a few times during the day on my browser and use the app on my phone for a few minutes at night. I’ve also limited how long I can use Twitter every day, which lets me ration my time on it.

I use Twitter lists to break down who I am following into categories. Most of my lists are emailed to me using Mailbrew a few times a week. I do this so that I catch the highlights from each list every few days, and then I don’t need to check on that list until the next email. Mailbrew allows me to catch up on Twitter content within the safe confines of my email and has effectively become my offline client for Twitter.

Lastly, Twitter handles many things better for me than third-party apps like Tweetbot. I can bookmark tweets and see threads better as two minor examples, and there are probably more. For me, though, it means that another app subscription is perhaps something that I can do without.

At the start of the year, I chose “build” as my word for the year. The single word strategy is the idea that you choose a word that will direct what you do for the year. Having not done this for a couple of years I wanted to go back to doing this so that I could at least focus on something for the year.

It’s mid-way through January and now seems as good as any to review what I’ve been building over the last two weeks and what I will be building in the near future.

My Twitter List Banner Maker (a mouthful I know) is now public on my GitHub profile. It’s far from complete but it’s working and with a few tweaks here and there can be used by others for their own lists. While building this I did learn a couple of things. Mainly, authentication with the new Twitter API, and also I improved my knowledge of RMagick by learning how to merge images together to change how they look.

In the background, there’s also a number of other things I’ve been building up.

• I am continuing to post to my blog during the weekdays to build an audience up again. I’m not looking to build an audience of thousands, just more people that like what I am writing.
• I am building a single document that will act as my playbook if you like for the day. A template for the day if you like. It’s been working well for me but it still needs some refining.

Looking ahead, over the next few weeks I am going to start building an application using the Blitz.js framework. A fellow developer from Glasgow put me onto this framework a week ago and I’m intrigued by the comparison to Rails but also that it’s a JavaScript framework and that’s one language that I am keen to build up my knowledge of in 2022.

The application won’t be too complex, a single-page application with a form that does validation and uses an external resource to look up information based on the data provided by the form. It was the simplest idea I could think of at the time and could be done within the next few weeks.

I’ll also continue to tweak the Twitter List Banner Maker so that it formats avatar images into a layout that is determined by the number of members on the list.

That’s enough for this month’s update. The next one will drop in mid-February.

I’ve been looking at my GitHub profile over the last couple of days. It seems like a graveyard of half-finished or throwaway projects that do not show my best work.

While I’m not in the freelance market and not looking for any roles soon, I would like my GitHub profile to reflect some of my better work. There are a few things I am going to do from now on to achieve this.

I have a backlog of projects that I’ve used for exploring different parts of Ruby, Rails and JavaScript. These primarily reside on my laptop and be shared for others to use with a bit of a polish. These projects are not, by any means, world-changing ideas. They are just projects that I used to try something out.

What I plan to do, is publish one project/application a month on my GitHub account. I will provide some instructions on running the application and any updates that I may do on it in the future.

I also have several other repositories on GitHub that are quite frankly just sitting there doing nothing, and they’re not worth much, so I’ll delete these from my account. There’s not much sense in having on my account if they’re not doing anything.

This month I’ll be wrapping up and publishing a ruby script that generates an image for your Twitter lists. I’ve been trying to get my head around the Twitter API over the last week and the different authentication methods needed to access other endpoints. After working this out on Wednesday night, I’m now making good progress with this script. I may try this out as a web application later in the year. I’m not sure yet.

That’s the plan anyway for my GitHub profile. 

I’m reading again. And it’s been long overdue. I can’t remember the last time I finished a book that I hadn’t read before. It’s been that long.

There are lots of pitiful excuses I could make for not reading. There are two significant reasons why I stopped reading.

The first reason was that I spent far too much time elsewhere. And that time elsewhere was usually on screens like television, games console, phone. The rotating screen exercise throughout the day was relentless. I traded one screen for the other throughout the day until right up until I went to sleep.

The second reason is not as significant, but it impacted my reading. I had a run of books that I didn’t finish. Most of these books were fiction, and I didn’t finish them because I lost interest in them.

Now, up to this point, I mostly read science fiction and fantasy books. On the odd occasion, I would read something else, but this genre was the one that I enjoyed the most. However, a pattern started to emerge between every handful of books I began to read. I would lose interest in it. After a couple of attempts to finish each book, I gave in. Eventually, I gave up reading altogether.

Thankfully, now things are starting to look up. I’m almost three-quarters of the way through my first book for 2022. I’ve also started another book that I hope to finish by the end of the month.

I do want to read more books this year. I have a stack of physical books on my desk that I need to get through and a reading list written down. I hope that’s all the planning I need for this year to start reading again.

If you are curious about the book I am currently reading. It is Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. The story itself is about preserving the human race following an apocalyptic event on Earth. I am thoroughly enjoying it.