28th January 2019 – 3rd February 2019

An easier time with childcare this week, with mostly morning drop offs, and some progress on my own projects as well as juggling client work made for a decent week.

Client work

A combination of catching up on work delayed by a server move for one set of clients, some straightforward updates for another, and dealing with more server problems for a third. The server problems were to do with an ageing Windows server and the host is hopefully now fixing them in the quiet hours of our night (a helpful side effect of being hosted in America for that set of sites.) Fortunately Laura was able to keep going with our mutual clients projects while I was distracted by the server problems. Mixed in with this was some invoice chasing, which has borne some fruit so far, although the situation is still a slight worry.

My personal tax return uncertainty from last week was resolved by the self assessment pages on the HMRC website updating and letting me know what I should pay them, which automatically included the on account payments from the previous year without me needing to put that money on the self assessment form. So, I had made the right choices on it.

My projects

Progress!

I managed to install and set up the latest version of Vagrant and Laravel’s Homestead. I’ve got my retrieved data in to the new MySQL. Fiddling with the sites I have which should have started working again… I’m having to reinstall Laravel and Spark for them, but that’s a straightforward process so didn’t take much time. I still have to do the final steps of copying over my code in to the new installs and adjusting a few bits to get it working. I hope to get that done next week.

Other progress – I spent some time working on the small version of the podcast notes app I’m hoping to use on a few sites. Plumbing in some server side code and getting it working gave me some very satisfying moments which have been missing on work projects over the last year or so. The workload I’ve been juggling for the last four years has definitely left me burnt out, and the feeling of satisfaction from this gives me hope that I’m pulling at the edges of the worst parts of the burn out and this is an early sign of some recovery.

Sky’s jQuery/Javascript code that the app is using is very easy to work with, but it still took me a while to get everything working correctly as Javascript is not my happy place. This and discussing some learning of React that Haze has been doing has reminded me I have a book on Vue.js to start working through, which will hopefully up my Javascript knowledge to a more useful level.

The personal version of the notes app is almost done, so hopefully I’ll be able to post some soon here as a beta test.

The bootstrappers group I run has suffered this month as I did not manage to organise a meeting, but I’m feeling the hours I would have spent on that were better spent making practical progress on my projects. Hopefully I’ll be able to find the time to fit one in during February.

The Farm

21 people along this week, which is nice as we’re getting back to normal numbers. My notes:

• Scoble scale foods
• Back problems
• Worthing Digital
• Property prices
• Racist relatives
• Ex-Football players burning through their earnings
• Brexit
• Mutual project catch up
• Personal / small projects can be funy
• Using an amp
• Moving on after splitting with a high intensity client
• Improvements in The Skiff

The Skiff

The Skiff has some new monitors that everyone can use, and chairs which we were talking about replacing recently, which is great. I was saddened to learn this was due to a project a friend runs closing their teaching centre, so I need to catch up with them about how things are going. Juggling family, client work and my own projects has meant I’m losing track of what a lot of friends are doing.

Also at The Skiff, I had an interesting conversation about Oliver Winks about Vuepress, a static site generator he’s enjoying using. That’s something I definitely want to look in to, although I’m not ready to dump WordPress just yet.

Reading: Continuing with Jeeves in the Offing, settled in nicely with the over-complicated situations and Jeeves has finally appeared in person.

Writing with: Mainly an OHTO Capsule multifunction pen. It is good for a multipen and pencil combo, but the black ink is a bit more grey than I’d like, and the two nib sizes are a bit close to each other so it’s hard to be sure which you’re using. Although not perfect, it’s very good looking for a multipen and works well enough for me to keep using it. I’ll be replacing the pencil lead with some I already have, which will hopefully last longer as the lead it comes with pretty much evaporates when it touches paper.