Our street is in a very quiet part of town, but like most places this time of year, there’s the frequent noise of fireworks being set off for Guy Fawkes night.
Building the reading list again
Last week I finished my first book in a long time. It felt good to get to the last page and actually enjoy the book for a change.
For a long time, I have struggled with books to read. As books have piled up, the want to read them hasn’t been there. And in some cases, when I do read them, I don’t end up enjoying the book and give up on it.
Here are a few more books that I am hoping to read over the next few months:
- Shiang: Empire of Salt by C. F. Iggulden
- The Falcon of Sparta by Conn Iggulden
- The Book of Dust volume I by Phillip Pullman
- Spitfire by John Nichol
- Super Thinking by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann
- Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
What does “Ikagi” mean to you?
The blogging challenge
Adam Keys has some words on the challenges of blogging.
The hardest part is showing up, every day, writing. The hardest part is writing! The second hardest thing is hitting the publish button on a regular basis, not necessarily every day.
I find the act of writing pretty straight-forward to do. Crack open a notebook or a text editor and after a few stumbling blocks I’ll get going.
The big challenge for me is hitting that publish button.
You might not have noticed, but my blogging activity has picked up since the start of the month. I’m using November to build up a wee habit of blogging daily. Every day, I’ll post a short post and a longer post. It’s working well so far.
Another study backs shorter work weeks
Another short-term study on moving to a shorter work week.
Is there evidence though, to still support this when the organisation has been on a shorter work week for longer than a month? How about a year?
I find it amazing that we’re able to do things more efficiently than ever before and yet we’re still working the same number of hours we did decades ago.
Quiet house
Using this afternoon’s quiet house to do a few things.
One of them is working out why I have now two of every app after upgrading macOS to Catalina. All my apps are accessible from Alfred in two directories now. I can find the same app in /Applications and /System/Volumes/Data/Applications.
In building a product for a specific market, I’ve discovered that the admin interface doesn’t need to be anything fancy. Feedback from beta users is that they like the basic screens.
A good turn out today for the start of the junior winter league at Paisley Golf Club. I hope the weather stays favourable through the winter so that the juniors can get more opportunities to play.
I’ve been following a few more people on Twitter and using Feedbin to read my timeline. The ability to mark tweets as read is such a simple thing. It would be nice if Twitter did this as well.
Gathering Ruby and Rails coding ideas
I’ve been collecting a few ideas for Ruby and Rails apps to try a few things out.
In the past I’ve ended up simply building some form of task manager or blog engine. In order to explore some of the other parts of Rails though, I’m need to try and build something a bit different.
Here’s what I have so far.
- A live updating leaderboard for an event. The idea behind this is to explore ActionCable again. I haven’t used this in a project for a couple of years. It would be good to get familiar with it again.
- A command line tool for generating images with text. I had a template I used last year for creating images for the golf club’s junior section for competition announcements. Rather than using the existing template I have with Pixelmator, it would be good if I could generate the same image using the command line. A nice way of exploring what Ruby can do with a good image library.
- A Microblogging client. This would simply be a client for posting message instead of being able to read posts. The idea here is to see if I can deploy a Rails app with something like Vue.js or React built in.
The idea is to build out each of these over the next few months to understand a bit more about the different parts of Ruby, Ruby on Rails and JavaScript frameworks that I can use with them.