One project live, feeling rough, oppressive heat, some client work done.

Client work

Nothing amazing to report on the client work front, all just bread-and-butter changes, planning and Google Ads work.

I put live the project for teaching safety through explaining the poor practises going on in ‘amusing’ pictures sent around groups and forums for HSE/OSHA/safety/working at height – Industrial Idiots. It’s still very rough around the edges, being a standard WordPress theme with some content in it. I’ve got an idea for a logo, but haven’t had time to put it together yet. Still, it’s up and I managed to get two posts in to it and sort out a Twitter account as well as the hosting, so that’s a good start.

I also discovered a sort-of ex-client, Ascendant Access, has gone under again, although may survive on making parts for the cherry pickers they used to manufacture. They were owned by my client Facelift for a while so I looked after their basic website and worked on an alternative which never quite made it live. It’s a shame to see a British manufacturer not be able to produce machines that are useful and used by a lot of councils and businesses around the country profitably enough to keep going.

My Projects

I managed a little work on my own projects, so some progress but a little halting.

Productivity

I have been trying to be sensible about the amount I’m trying to get done to make sure I’m fully recovered from the two migraines I had last week – they’re often a sign I’m overdoing it. Work wasn’t helped by it being very hot, and I really appreciated the air conditioning at The Skiff when I worked from there.

I felt rough a chunk of the week and I’m not sure if this was a general, low level cold, the heat, or hay fever.

Learning

Nothing on 30×500 apart from some notes on what I need to write to get to the next stage.

The Farm

Attendance was only 16, with a few regulars away. Held at the Caxton Arms. My notes were…

• Single Page Apps in Vue vs React
• The Eden Project lizards
• How much biodiversity do you need for a species to keep going?
• Successful subcontracting is hard (and requires QA)
• Indenting styles
• How hot are the Caxton’s hottest hot wings?
• Working on other people’s code – only for time & materials not fixed price
• How do you get greenfield projects?
• Mutual app project
• How to tell a client the ‘small’ thing they’ve asked for is chargeable
• Rounding on a threshold of activity (e.g. when to re-render if a slider is being used)
• Coding in Metal/GPU coding in iOS
• Factoring
• How do you structure your work with a client – contracts etc
• IR35 changes
• Parenthood

Family

A lot of Saturday was lost to running around because the food we’d bought had gone off in the heat. Sunday started badly with the work on an inconsiderate neighbour’s garage starting early and waking me up, but got better with Katie taking Tom to the cinema to give me a break, and having a barbeque in the evening. One of the baby seagulls nesting on our roof was having trouble scaling our roof having slid down from their nesting spot, which wasn’t the best accompaniment to the food.

One thing I’ve realised is Katie having to work at least one and sometimes both days at the weekend means I’m not getting enough down time as having our son on my own means he will basically nag me about stuff a lot of the day when he’s not occupied on something else. I’m resisting the urge to let him use games/screen time more than he is as we’re generally happy with his limits, but need to find a way to get him to be a little more independent in his play when he’s not gaming.

Reading: Still reading the James Bond novel Forever and a Day by Anthony Horowitz. Still going along fine, not remarkable but getting more gripping as it’s going along.

Writing with: a Zebra ZmulsionEX, nice smooth writer but can take a while to dry depending on the paper.

Listening to: Startups for the Rest of Us episode 448 “Let’s Talk About Bluetick” where they talked through some of the problems Mike Taber, one of the hosts of the podcast, is having growing his software as a service business Bluetick. This was pretty brutal in parts as you could tell Mike was struggling to talk about how much his motivation has been hit and what problems he’s having pushing forwards as the business has plateaued. It gave me a lot to think about as I can recognise some of the same behaviours in myself, and I’m now where near as successful as he’s got in the SaaS space – not only does he have a running SaaS, he’s written a book about them, and co-runs a very successful conference about them. One to listen to again soon. I hope Mike finds a way out of his situation, even if it’s to change in a way he’s not sure about.