22nd April 2019 – 28th April 2019

Progress, slow, but progress.

Client work

A combination of planning the development of a bunch of small sites for marketing purposes, and potential Google Ads campaigns, for one client, and mailing list clean up and Google Ads work for another. Mixed in with trying to work out a new version of LinkedIn’s “Apply with LinkedIn” feature, which they have launched a new version of without mentioning it in their old docs. This seems to be part of LinkedIn being more under Microsoft’s development processes, but is ruddy annoying. Laura and I could have avoided a bunch of work if it had been clear that Apply with LinkedIn had been changed a third way, having worked on integrating with their second version as the first was being closed down.

My Projects

Some useful progress on my Brisk app. I worked on the part that I’d run out of time on last week and found out how to bring in a library from Git using Composer, and then got very bogged down on the library I was trying to use for pluralising words. Someone had made a Laravel wrapper for a library I’d found to do this work in the past, but it wouldn’t work within Laravel and my hacking about with it wasn’t working. Fortunately after explaining the problem to Laura, she solved it one way, then found a more permanent solution. First solution was – we both realised the namespace in the library was different from what was being called. I tried to re-write the library around it but didn’t get all the code, more sensibly, Laura re-wrote the calls to it so they were correct. Then she discovered there were fixes in the development branch in Git, which I’d missed. Frustrationing, but a good reminder of why I work with Laura so much – she’s a very good programmer – and why sometimes it’s best to ask someone else when you get bogged down.

I’m now half way through doing a search terms test for a client using my app as a proper test of how the code is working.

Late in the week I had an idea for a type or series of ebook that I could self publish, which I’m currently leaving as ideas within my notebook. Writing down ideas is what I do to try and get them out of my head so I don’t obsess about them, and is a great way of laying everything out so I can come back later and realise what an idiot past me was for thinking it was such a great idea. Or, perhaps, find something I can develop in to a useful project.

Finally on the personal projects front, nothing useful done with the weeknotes subreddit I started last week. I’ve put in a good post someone gave me when I started doing weeknotes, but haven’t done anything else with it yet.

Productivity

Pretty good but some annoying lapses on Thursday due to tiredness. No migraines and hip relatively good for most of the week, and helped by a bike ride on Sunday. Tom being back at school Katie’s shifts being more favourable to pick ups after school was a great help.

Learning

Still didn’t manage to re-start due to my annoying Thursday lapse in productivity. Need to get back on that particular horse as my delays are getting silly.

The Farm

Numbers down again to 13, with a few regulars away and a lot of rain early in the evening putting people off. In the Caxton Arms, my notes were…

• Coworking spaces
• Hot food
• Hot Ones – Hot food interviews on YouTube
• Gothic metal /the many types of Metal
• What to try to boost your website rankings in Google
• Site speed enhancements
• Family troubles
• Migraines (reprise)
• Guitar playing
• WordPress Yellow Pencil plugin hack
• Trying to keep people happy with your app
• The race to the bottom of app prices
• Late payments act – put on your invoices!
• Keeping an old computer as backup can save your business
• Live app testing
• Pondering going back to PC as Mac laptops aren’t cutting it for their cost
• Getting feedback from app users
• World Championship Snooker

It was nice to have a catch up with Dave before the Farm started, as I was already in Brighton working at The Skiff on Wednesday. Meeting someone between working and the Farm is a bit of a double-edged sword. While it’s nice to see someone, and especially this as Dave is very interesting to talk to, it does mean I am “on” more for the whole day, which lead to feeling absolutely knackered by the end of Wednesday.

Reading: I finished A Scanner Darkly by Philip K Dick. A good sort of twist, sort of explanation at the end. Probably the best story of his I’ve read character-wise, or at least the most believeable – definitely using a speculative setting to try to tell a version of the stories he had seen around him through his own drug taking and the people he met while doing it.

Writing with: Again mainly my J Herbin rollerball, and still not quite finished the cartridge of Chocolate Brown ink as I wasn’t doing a lot of handwriting this week. Also a bit of use of an old Zebra Orbitz I had lying around, which is now a Frankenpen as I shattered the rubber grip while fiddling with it wondering how solid it had gone with time. Turns out: very solid indeed. Oops.