Weeknotes #20

It’s been a pretty good week, if a little odd! I’ve not been on any project work at Clearleft, which is a blessing and a curse. When I’m in the thick of a project, I wish for quieter moments. But now I have that space, I’m desperate for a project again. Learning to be content and looking at the bigger picture is something I need to improve on.

I’ve been working on a side project/tool during work hours, and it’s beginning to take shape. I can’t say much more than that right now, not that it’s a secret, it’s more a case of as we start to use it, the product is turning into an entirely different beast. I can’t currently articulate it in a single sentence, so that probably needs to happen before I blog about it.

Watching friends succeeding in their work is such a joy. I went to Liam’s to discuss an API integration and it was so cool to see all the amazing work he’s creating in Webflow! On Tuesday evening, Cassie presented a Smashing Magazine webinar on Interactive SVG - it was mega inspiring, thoughtfully prepared and brilliantly executed!

I got rather upset with printers on Tuesday evening but after wine, time and some buried drivers, it sorted itself out.

Wednesday was bonkers. My brother was heading up to Oxford, so I dropped him at the train station at silly o’clock before pottering down to work. The morning was spent writing a blog post on linear interpolation functions. It’s the first ‘proper’ post I’ve done in a while, and it felt great to write something longer-form than these weeknotes. Mum & Dad then popped down to Brighton and we had lunch together.

Then in the evening, I was invited to a planning meeting for a trip to Athens. A group from church went out last year and they’re going again in September. Following some drop-outs, a spot has become available and my name was put forward! By Thursday morning, my annual leave was organised and I was signed up. This is most out of character for me, and yet I’m genuinely not feeling anxious right now - which I guess is a good sign!

I mean, I only got an hours sleep that night, but it wasn’t anxiety - my brain had just gone into overdrive! The lack of sleep made productivity on Thursday a bit of a challenge. The trip does mean missing the wonderful State of the browser which sucks - it was so good last year, and we’d got a group of seven going. Hey ho! They will have a great time, and I will too!

Homebrew website club was a huge success this week. Hana very kindly offered to help with the information architecture mess that is my blog. She got me to print out all the post titles onto cards - this tool was very handy. She then did a first-pass open card sort, grouping posts into sensible categories (ignoring the categories they are currently in). This exercise really brought to light how bad some of my post titles are, here are some choice cuts:

• Making some updates
• The recap
• Eulerplate

Any ideas what those posts are about? No, me either.

We then played around with the categories and posed many hypothetical content scenarios. It was properly fascinating, and really made me think about the content on my site, who it’s for, and how it can work harder.

Some amazing ideas were floated in the workshop, so I’ll need to weigh them, decide which are right and then make a bit of a backlog. It’s very exciting!

Photos of the week

Given the lack of recent weeknotes, here’s a few photos from the past month. Sidenote, I’d really like to organise imagery on my site better but that’s another IA task in itself!

Nymans

Lauren and I took a trip to Nymans earlier in the month. It’s so much fun doing photography with her! I can’t honestly remember who took which shots, we kept swapping between the two cameras with the 24-120mm and 105mm macro lenses.

London

I’ve been up to London a couple of times recently. Once to watch the Breathe Magic final show in the Magic Circle! Lauren volunteered for the fortnight; it was truly amazing to see how much they’d helped the kids.

Cassie and I also headed up for a work discussion and we took a trip to see the Dinosaurs. I was very excited.

Other shots