Weeknotes 17

29th April – 5th May 2019

Summary: Plague house.

Client work

Various updates chugged through. Problems with the new “Apply with LinkedIn” code came down to us not having the right API keys, which caused me to need to apply to become a “LinkedIn Talent Solutions Partner.” This involved filling in a very long form taking many details about my company, practically up to my inside leg measurement. It was obviously designed for companies much larger than mine is, but I’m hopeful I’ll get accepted as I’ve three clients using paid services at LinkedIn, so they have every reason to let me write some code to let those clients’ websites send more traffic to LinkedIn. The wait to find out is up to two months, so I’m not holding my breath.

On a similar front, Laura and I got “Apply with Indeed” working for a client’s recruitment site. This lets candidates who have their details stored within Indeed apply for a vacancy shown on my client’s site with their Indeed details by clicking a couple of buttons and not needing to type anything new in.

The main stumbling block on my side of the work was the Apply with Indeed button clashed badly with my client’s site design. After faffing with trying to restyle the button, something Indeed would clearly rather we did not do as they set up all the CSS that styles the button in a way that changes every time the page reloads to stop you fiddling with it, I hit a simpler way after talking to Peter at The Skiff.

The pages now hide the Indeed provided button, and uses Javascript triggered by one of our own buttons to click the hidden one. Same useful help for the candidate, but it lets us easily have a button that fits with the design of the site. It would have been much easier if Indeed would let us do some limited restyling within their guidelines rather than faff about in this way.

My Projects

A few tweaks to Brisk based on the work I was doing last week, to make the suggestions of negative keywords a little better in actual use. Not much else achieved due to losing time to illness.

Productivity

Got better as the week went on although I had quite a few wake ups because my son has a cold giving him a nasty cough. Thursday was heavily hit by my son being off school ill, after being bad in the night not only with the cold but having hurt his eye somehow. This meant I had five hours sleep on Wednesday night, and had limited work time but did get in a few useful hours thanks to family having Tom for a while.

I’ve now got the cold he’s at the tail end of, so I’ll have to see how that affects next week.

Learning

Once again didn’t manage to restart as I was juggling some extra childcare and tiredness. Have some time blocked out for this early next week.

The Farm

Attendance a bit low at 14, but a good, interesting meet up in the Caxton Arms. My notes were…

  • Bad sleep = bad productivity
  • Poor support from hosts
  • Freelance Buddy
  • Clients affected by Brexit
  • New startup project
  • Laravel work
  • Digitising the NHS
  • Outsourcing – great for some things not for others
  • Phone calls – by appointment please!
  • Over-automation
  • Mutual project catch up
  • iOS development
  • Backdrop – Drupal 7 improved and with some good bits from 8
  • Looking for React.js work

Reading: I started The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. This is the sort of story that should be right up my alley, but I’m just not gelling with it so far. I think I’m too tired to appreciate its meandering manner and might need to swap on to something else for a while.

I also made a little more progress on Deep Work by Cal Newport, which I started just over a year ago. I think my problem with it is now I’m half way through it seems I’ve had the useful information it has to give and I’m down to repetition of the central points, a view reinforced by the interview I listened to with him by Tropical MBA – the book has now covered in depth everything they talked about. I should give up on it but have clung on, probably because I’m more used to reading fiction where things can get better after a while.

Writing with: Mainly the Zebra Orbitz I had resurrected last week. I’m pretty sure the ink is feeling it’s age a bit with this one, I’m sure the previous one I used was smoother.

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