Matthew Lang

... a great place to write. No fast food, no traffic, no slog of a commute, no rat race, no corridor warriors, no boss and no 24 hour internet.

Last year was a great year for me in terms of blogging. I managed to write posts for most week days with just a few weeks off, I kept my Fixie Friday posts going and last but not least, I used my blog to share links. Mission accomplished I would say for 2013 but what about 2014?

Next year poses some challenges. I want to keep blogging but I also want to increase the quality of my posts without decreasing the frequency of my posts. I've been thinking about this over the last week during my stay in Canada.

In my review of last year, I certainly skimped on technical posts from my development work. Not that I want my blog to turn into a developer's only blog, but I do want to write more technical posts about my work as a web developer. Maybe one a fortnight would suffice as a starter.

I also kept my posts rather brief with maybe just one post a fortnight being more than 500 words. I want to write one post a fortnight that is more than 750 words with the time taken to research and edit the piece before I hit the publish button. I rarely did any editing on my blog posts with just a skimp over it to check for spelling and grammar mistakes. That's not a good habit to get into, so there will be more of an emphasis on editing everything I write, but in particular the longer blog posts.

To help with this commitment to better writing, my working week is going to be slightly different. I've reserved four days a week for client work with one day a week being reserved for my own work. This gives me a chance to get some writing done in the morning and also curate some content for the Netterpress newsletter while it's in a trial phase.

I'm intentionally not over commiting to doing too much on my blog. I've got other areas where I also need to focus on, so these two changes I've highlighted above are a good place to start. I'll review this after 3 months and see if it's working for me. No reason that it shouldn't, it is after just a small change to my blogging habits.

After the ice storm that hit the Toronto area before Christmas, I managed to get a few shots of the fields across the road from my in-laws house just as the sun was setting. These were taken over two days which explains the change in the clouds.

Last one of 2013, enjoy!

via FGGT

Every yeay I read that blogs are dead or declining in use.

Blogs obviously aren't dead and I acknowledged that much right from the title. I (obviously) think there's a lot of value in the blog format, even apart from its massive influence on online media in general, but as someone who's been doing it since 1998 and still does it every day, it's difficult to ignore the blog's diminished place in our informational diet.

— RIP The Blog - 1997 to 2013 by Jason Kottke

Despite the declining use of blogs, I think they're still a great format for publishing and I'll continue to blog and read other blogs until they are truly dead.

via FGGT

via Kottke.org

And the boundaries just got pushed even further for bike tricks.

via Kottke.org

The last few weeks have seen my writing tail off from the schedule I would have preferred to keep. It's meant that I've resorted to writing posts on the day they are supposed to be published. Hardly ideal, but those are the breaks in life.

Right now seems like a good time to take a break for a few weeks over the holidays and regroup. I'll still be posting links to here and maybe the odd written post once a week, but I'll be relaxing my writing schedule until the start of next year.

See you all on the other side!

The start of next year will mark my one year anniversary as a freelance web developer. It's been an amazing ride this last year. I can't believe I'm still doing what I am doing. Working from home, flexible hours and of course working with Ruby on Rails are all great benefits but what's it been really like?

Clients

As for the client roster I'm dealing with just a handful of clients at the moment. The clients I have I can a manage at the moment and I haven't got to the stage where I would be looking for another developer to sub-contract work to. It has been at the back of my mind the last few days with the amount of work I have lined up for next year, but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

I've managed to build a nice relationship with the clients I have at the moment. I would be the first to say that I'm not really a people person, but the feedback I've had from clients has been excellent. I think being in constant communication is key to building a great relationship with clients.

Work

The work itself has all been Ruby on Rails work. All the applications I am working on are 3.x applications but I have rolled out a couple of Rails 4 applications of my own just to see any differences so that I can prepare for any upgrades I may have to do in the near future.

I do all back end development work. I don't do any design work or front end development at all. It's amazing the number of people who think I do the design work. A designer I am not but I am looking to expand to doing some front end development work next year. It's important to be not only providing value for clients but also providing options. If I can provide additional services that they would go to someone else for then that benefits

Adjustments

I've had to make a number of small adjustments to my daily work routine in order to survive working from home.

I keep to a 9 to 5 work day purely for the fact that it works well for not just me but everyone in the house as well. What's the point in me working all evening and missing spending time with my family? However I do have to sometimes do work at night, maybe once a week. Things like invoicing and admin work I do at night so as not to split my time on client work during the day. It's extra work that needs to be done.

Jen works half days on a Thursday and a Friday. When she comes home with our youngest son on those days, we have a chat about our day so far and have some lunch. Then I retreat back to the office to finish my work for the rest of the day. She understands the importance of me finishing my work for the day and I only get interrupted by Jen if something is really urgent.

An adjustment I've recently made is no client work on a Friday. I made this decision so that I could get some time to work on side projects and hopefully turn them into income streams. Client work is important but my freelance business will need to weather the ups and downs of demands for my work. In order to get through those hard times it makes sense to have other income streams from products.

Benefits

Working for myself is a real benefit to me at the moment. We have a young family with one at school and one at nursery. With myself and Jen both working child care has always been an issue. Up to last year though we were quite fortunate in our circumstances but if I continued working full-time we would definitely need to consider child care for both our kids, which at the time was an expense we were hoping to avoid.

Working for myself though means that I am able to be more flexible in my hours. I still do a 9 to 5 day most days, but having the option there to take my oldest son to school and pick him up means that we only pay child care for our youngest. I always catch up on work at night if I need to but it's usually only an hour or two which leaves me time to spend with my family.

Drawbacks

I'm usually quite good working on my own, but I do miss the banter of working in a development team. Not just the chance to work with others but also the banter, the jokes and the other perks that come from being part of a team. That's the only drawback to my freelance career so far. I can live with working on my own. The benefits far outweigh this one drawback.

A Great Year

It's been a great year working for myself. It's always been something I've wanted to do, but the opportunity just hasn't been there in the past. Now that I've completed a year working solo, I'm prepared to put the work in to maintain my freelance career as long as I can. It just offers so many more benefits than a full-time position. I'm looking forward to writing another post like this at the end of next year. It's going to be hard work but it's going to be enjoyable hard work.

Capturing. It's an action that I repeat every day. Although I don't have exact figures for it, I probably manage about fifty captures a day depending on the context of the capture. Bookmarks, snippets, thoughts, images, posts, code and more. They're all captured into various places and then reviewed, read or actioned on at a later date. Here's a few examples of the things I'm capturing during the day.

Thoughts and ideas

I'm now getting into the habit of journaling about four times a day. Through the day I'll capture ideas, thoughts and challenges that I've faced. I might come across an idea for a small application or I'll make a note about a bit of work that needs to be automated. It like a private social feed back to myself. At the end of the day is my review of the day. I do this every day.

Web pages

Web pages get captured in three places at the moment. The first place is Evernote. Anything that's interesting on App.net is starred. I have a recipe on IFTTT that reads my favourited posts from my timeline there and posts them to my Evernote account.

The second place is the Safari Reading List. I moved for this from Instapaper a few weeks ago. This tends to be for posts that I've found interesting in Feedbin and would like to look at later on.

The third and last place is my private bookmarking application. A couple of months back, I decided to roll my own bookmarking application. It's far from complete but it serves it's purpose for the moment.

Actions

Actions are still a work in progress. Previously I would capture all actions in TaskPaper and then during my weekly review, assign them to a list. For reasons I mentioned in another post, I decided to switch to Todoist for all my list management needs. Anything that requires actioning is added here to the inbox list so that I can assign it to a project or folder during my weekly review.

Emails

This wouldn't be a capture post unless I wrote about my inbox. I tend to keep my inbox fairly clutter free. I carefully vet email subscriptions on a monthly basis and I use a lot of rules that shuffle emails about to various folders. I don't think of my email as multiple inboxes, I tend to view as just one. I have the keyboard navigation pretty much memorised so that I can switch from one folder to another and read and organise emails as I need too.

Most of the emails I do receive are either deleted or filed away on folders, but for a small percentage of them though I forward them onto Evernote. After losing a few important emails a couple of months ago, I've decided to invest in Evernote as a place for important information that I can't afford to lose.

Still too many inboxes

One thing that has become clear from these captures that I do the most is that I still have too many inboxes to maintain. All in I'm sitting at five inboxes at the moment. That's still too many for me.

In a perfect world I would have one inbox that is connected to all the other products and services that I use and lets me move and organise items according to their context, but that's an idea for another day.

At the moment, I think the best I can do is identify a place where I capture the most items and make it integrate with other inboxes with some kind of automated workflow. I can do this easily enough with the tools I have on my MacBook Pro possibly using scripts, but the challenge will be making this work on my iPhone or iPad.

This time the nicely titled, "How to be more intelligent 101". Essential reading from NB.

Mark your calendars for next year, Patrick Rhone is proposing a new holiday for journal fans everywhere, Journal Day (December the 9th).

There are many ways to celebrate or traditions one could keep to mark the day. For instance, this might be the day to take out previous journals and reflect on where you were then versus where you are today. Another tradition may be to let someone you trust read one you have kept and get to know the “real” you.

— Journal Day by Patrick Rhone

Column space is a prize piece of real estate in a newspaper. In a medium that is restricted by physical size and print run, editors need to select the stories that will interest readers and will of course sell more newspapers.

Unfortunately the same can't be said for a newspaper's modern incarnation, the website for the newspaper. Pages are cheap to put together and publish. News stories ranging from the headline news of the day that affects the whole world to celebrity spats on social media. It seems as if there is no check in place to say whether a story is worthy of being published. All too often, even the most ridiculous of stories get published.

I'm writing this because people that comment on whether a story is worth the column space on a newspaper's website tend to forget or not know that website pages are cheap when compared to the printed word on a dead tree.

Newspapers are restricted to a set number of pages and for a limited time. There's also the printing costs and shipping costs in getting all these newspapers around the country. Even the smallest of stories have to justify their worthiness to be printed in the final edition of the newspaper for the following day.

Now look at a news website. Technology today can now scale websites to millions of visitors a month on platforms that are readily available to many. A typical news website will be continually updated throughout the day. Every hour sees the addition of more news stories and existing ones being updated with new information if they are still relevant.

Even news with the smallest confirmed information is published with breaking news on a story being published so that so that news website can say, "Yeah, we're investigating this story too".

As more details on these stories come through, they are quickly expanded into more details pieces with links to other related stories and sometimes even interactive maps or graphs are added. There is simply no limit to the column space that a news website has. It's is always growing as along as it is relevant.

Then there's the column space on the front page of a newspaper. Reserved only for the big stories of the day, it was once the coveted part of the newspaper where many journalists want to see their story being published.

The news website is a little less precious though about what makes front page news or in this case, home page news. The home page has become a carousel of stories that are always in a state of change. Developing stories are pushed to the top portion of the page, with other stories eventually tailing off to the bottom. Where newspapers in the past only published a handful of stories on their front page, news sites can easily accommodate over 50 different stories on their home page.

There's no rule now in saying what makes the cut for published news. The idea of column space is dead. News now moves at such a frantic pace that news sites change every minute depending on what's happening around the world. News websites just want to be seen to be reporting the news that happening now rather than reporting the news that is relevant or important.

What if there was a news website that respected the fixed number of pages they had available and only reported on the news that mattered? What if it remained static for 24 hours and only updated once a day? Would you read it?

That's the problem though, no one wants a news website like that. The majority of us expect the news to be updated on a minute by minute basis and within easy reach on any one of the computers or devices they happen to be near at the time.

Column space was once treasured, but sadly it has been replaced by the rule that a story can be published if that story is relevant or might bring more visitors to that newspaper's website. It's that last part that irks me, as it appears to be the guiding factor on many published news stories that are just not relevant with what's happening in the world today.

I'll sign off now, as I'm running out of my column space of 750 words.

My blog archive goes as far back as 2009. A single post on a suggestion for Google Reader is all I can show for that year. In 2010, I wrote two posts, then in 2011 I wrote some more. My early blog posts might have lacked content and aim, but it was a start. It's crossed my mind today that many of these posts are no longer relevant or readable and therefore could be deleted.

Should I delete any posts just because I thought they were inferior?

Absolutely not.

My blog archive is my digital timeline, it's not a complete history, but I'm getting more and more consistent with my posts and I'm frequently writing from a reflective angle. My archive is me through the years. A scrapbook of my thoughts on various topics. I might not have liked what I wrote in the past but I leave it there as a reminder. When I compare what I am writing about today with what I wrote about in the past, it lets me see I am getting better at putting my thoughts into words.

Nicholas Bate identifies the seven ways to self-destruction.

Tip: Identify and eliminate these destructive patterns.

Proof that technology and search companies are not the only corporate bullies when it comes 'brand protection'.

Just disgusting Specialized, and yes, the actual Roubaix cobblestones are what first come to mind when I hear the name. Not your bike.

I've read quite a few articles about teaching kids how to program and write code. There's the argument that the world has embraced technology to such an extent that it's hard not to have your life touched by technology in some way. Some advocates of teaching kids to program say that it should be part of the school curriculum from a very early age.

I agree with teaching kids about technology and how to control it, but I believe this should only start at a point where reading and writing have been mastered. The point where kids can read basic instructions and write about their experiences.

I think my oldest son is at that point. So next year, I'm going to start teaching him how to write code. It won't just be about writing code though, I aim to educate him about basic terminal commands, show him how computers work and how their used all over the world in different ways.

I'll be blogging about it along the way, maybe one post a month, with a guide to what he has been working on. It should be fun, and it will be nice to get to spend time with him as well.

Love the diamond tubes on the frame, really sets the bike apart from most other track bikes.

via Cycle EXIF Update

Resistance is a natural response when you're faced with a big challenge or project. It can be all too easy to simply shrug off the challenge and look elsewhere for something else to do. I have to admit, there have been a few days over the course of this year I did exactly that. Looking back, my reasons for resisting to step up to the challenge were varied.

Decisions

We make hundreds of decisions everyday, but when a decision is part of a long term commitment, it can be difficult to sometimes make that decision. What if I make the wrong choice? Can I change my mind at a later date?

The details of decisions cost me a lot of time this year. The decisions I was making were not huge decisions, they were simply decisions that would have a small effect on the outcome of a project.

I should have shrugged of the resistance to not making a decision and just committed to a choice, an outcome. If I made a mistake then it's just time lost in finding the right decision. We can't make good decisions all the time.

Confidence

Or should I put it as lack of confidence? Despite having worked on many software development projects over the years, my confidence isn't 100% when faced with a challenge or a problem.

As a kid I would rarely put my hand up to answer a question in class for fear of getting it wrong and looking stupid. It's weird because a couple of weeks ago at my oldest son's parents night at school, the teacher told me that my son lacked confidence in answering questions in class. Bit of a family trait then.

Anyway, regardless of the size of the challenge or problem, I started to see that the way to build confidence when faced with a challenge is to do it a little bit at a time. Just a few small wins can do wonders for your confidence, and as long as you're making significant progress, any bumps on the road will only knock your confidence slightly, which is easier to recover from.

Small steps

And that leads me onto steps, or small steps in this case. When faced with a challenge, it can be easy to view it as one challenge, one step, one action if you will.

One giant step can make most people think twice before committing to a challenge. However, breaking this giant step down into smaller steps can make it look more manageable than the action of one massive step. As I said previously about confidence, taking something and breaking it down into the smallest bits you can manage can make that giant step look much more easier to accomplish.

I resisted for so long on a couple of projects this year due to the above factors, but having worked through one of these projects, I was surprised to see that I could make it work. Overcoming those factors that contribute to resistance can all of a sudden make that death-march project look more appealing and doable.

It's the start of January and I'm already giving my motto for next year some thought. It's simply a theme that you keep true to for the next year of your life. It's a simple core goal to stick to for a year. I only started this when I was 35 so my mottos list is short for the moment.

I got the idea from Buster Benson, who does his mottos from his birthday, but I prefer the idea of starting it at the start of the year. My birthday is in February anyway, so it's not too far off.

Last year's motto was Be Independent:

My way of defining career independence is to be an independent developer. Simple. I want to ultimately pick and choose the work that I want to do in the future. I want to be independent of another company’s goals and objectives and work towards my goals.

It didn't go completely to plan on all aspects of being independent, but the key success from this was that I am steadily becoming financially independent. With my freelance work, I'm forced to consider budgets carefully, look for ways of being more productive with my time and of course accumulating a safety cushion should I get stuck for work. This mostly went well apart from building products to supplement my income.

So what about next year then? Well, one thing from this year was definitely clear. I budgeted my time poorly when it came to side projects and products. A list of ideas is still sitting on the sideline. I worked a lot this year, but I didn't take anytime to develop anything for myself.

So with this in mind, I'm thinking of setting the motto for next year as Smarter Budgeting.

This isn't just a time thing for completing products. I want to budget time for not just products, but also cycling, reading and of course spending time with my family. I just got my mountain bike back from our local bike shop and I'm itching to get back out on the trails, especially in the winter when the braes at the back of my house get a slight dusting of snow.

Over the next couple of weeks, some thought will be given to how I work towards this motto and some daily changes that will need to be made.

via FGGT

I'll be honest, I'm not a completely confident person. For those that know me personally this will come as no surprise. Right from when I was a kid, I struggled with answering questions in class, school debates and generally making my voice heard. Even after over 15 years of education and many different job and roles in the workplace, those confidence jitters still get to me. When it comes to public speaking, I avoid it entirely if I can.

It doesn't get any easier when I'm writing either. As I type this, my hand is itching to select all I've written and delete it.

When I am working on a post to publish, I just don't have the courage of my convictions. I've tried in the past numerous times to put my thoughts together on a number of topics but in the end I've just deleted the post and looked for something else to write.

Half the battle I face is actually articulating my thoughts into words, written or spoken, so that they present an argument or reasoning that others will not react with offence. The other half of the battle is following up those words with replies or explanations to others. If you're going to voice your opinion on a topic then you need to be able to back that opinion up and explain it.

It's only in the last couple of years that I've managed to start making progress on building up my confidence when it comes to public speaking. My stint in an agile development team done wonders for my confidence. I found that daily stand ups and retrospectives were great opportunities to voice my thoughts within a group. I'm still not there when it comes to public speaking, but I'm gradually chipping away at it and building up my confidence.

Am I ready to do a talk at a conference? Hell no.

A local meet up or user group? Maybe.

As for the writing side of voicing my thoughts, it's definitely easier than speaking. I do find it much easier to just write. Whether those words get published is down to me and whether I feel confident publishing those words. I'm happy for the moment to let just a trickle of my writing find its way here on my blog. It might only be one or two posts a month that test my confidence but with each one I'm raising the bar slightly.

This week I migrated my master list over to the Todoist service. I've been using Taskpaper for most of the year but one thing that is evidently missing from using this is that I have no way of easily reviewing the past week's completed tasks. I could put together a script that would count the number of completed tasks on each day in the archived section, but I keep putting it off. The other half of the problem is the synchronising conflicts I was getting from syncing my master list to Dropbox.

In the end I decided that it was definitely time to try something else. That's when I noticed Todoist while browsing the App Store. Unlike many cloud based task management services it does track the number of completed tasks for you while you work. As the end of the week draws near I am looking forward to seeing a healthy number of completed tasks for each day of the week.

Like Taskpaper, Todoist does support the concept of labels and projects which I still need. One last feature which is really nice is the templates feature. When you frequently do the same tasks over and over again, Todoist lets you export tasks as a template so that you can import them again.

It's fair to say that I've given Taskpaper a fair go but my needs have evolved over the last few months. I'm hoping that Todoist fits my needs for the foreseeable future.

I managed to catch up on my queue of podcasts this morning and one of the topics on discussion on the Ruby rogues podcast was that of sharpening your saw. I know the term from Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. What it means is the continual act of making yourself better but it can also apply to other things like the tools you use.

It made me realise that of all the applications I have I have yet to learn the basic shortcut keys that make these applications easy to access from anywhere. The first thing I did after listening to the podcast was create a note in Evernote with a list of all the shortcut keys for the applications that I use.

Over the next week I'm going to familiarise myself with a few shortcut keys at a time. This little habit is only saving a few seconds at a time, but over the course of a year, all those little seconds and keystrokes add up. I'm not trying to steal time, I'm just trying to make more efficient use of my time.