This past month has been an absolute blur. Seriously, where has August gone? Part of me is glad that the weather has been pretty poor for this time of year, because I wouldn't have wanted to be that busy whilst also melting.
What's interesting is that today, the first day I've had in weeks without a deadline, has been a terrible one for productivity - It's like my brain never got out of bed this morning. "Diamonds are formed under pressure", as the saying goes. And now, without the pressure of a deadline my mind has completely switched off.
This is also my first post since 30th June, which is disappointing as prior to that I was on a bit of a roll, posting a couple of times each month. It'll be good to get back to writing about CSS again and finally (fingers crossed) start writing some longer articles about design.
The week is off to a miserable start with heavy rain. It's actually pretty chilly, too. But then shorts and tshirt is my go-to remote working attire of choice.
An Etch office poll to see if staff prefer to stack cups up or down on shelves provides incredibly divisive (I stack mine facing down).
England won last night (Tuesday) to finish top of Group D. They'll face the runner up of Group F, which'll be either France, Germany or Portugal. 😬
Lots of meetings today (Wednesday). Spent some time researching font rendering in browsers. I feel like there's more I can be doing in this area to make website text look better.
Got a client meeting coming up for some idea generation. Also took part in the weekly Etch Play live show on Twitch.
Yesterday, 123-reg emailed to let me know that the domain bengammon.com was available to buy for £3,561.
It made me laugh. What an absurd amount of money for a domain that is clearly a name. I can only assume that the word 'gammon' is on a list of product keywords that the domain registrar, GoDaddy, uses to set aside words/phrases that they believe to be more desirable for businesses?
Is GoDaddy hoping there's a Ben out there somewhere, ready to launch a delicious line of flavoured gammons?
I don't have much experience with dot com domains, so I have no idea if this 'valuation' is likely to decrease over time or not. This is a shame because anything up to £100 I would have been seriously tempted by.
Maybe I should email them and make them an offer...
As of today, I have officially been working remotely for an entire year. It weirdly seems like a long time yet has somehow passed quickly.
Part of me always thought I would work remotely one day but the pandemic has made that a reality much sooner. It may have forced us all into remote working but for me that's the way it's going to stay, too, now Etch are a remote-first organisation.
Twelve months ago I started a remote working timeline to document how I was feeling and some of the big pandemic updates that were happening. I managed to keep that going until day 173, by which point it had become incredibly boring and repetitive but it was definitely a worthwhile exercise during a difficult time.
What is and what isn't a programming language? Twitter can't decide. Each week the never-ending debate rages on. I have no plans to fan those flames here.
I'm a designer who codes but I've never been comfortable using a label of 'developer' to describe what I do. Recently, I've noticed a couple of new terms have begun circulating on social media and I'm a fan:
Front-of-the-front-end
Back-of-the-front-end
Brad Frost has written an excellent post on how these labels provide a much-needed distinction between the types of web development that take place.
A succinct way I’ve framed the split is that a front-of-the-front-end developer determines the look and feel of a button, while a back-of-the-front-end developer determines what happens when that button is clicked.
These labels are great and I feel completely comfortable using front-of-the-front-end as a title because it is a much more accurate representation of my skillset.
I've always been pretty bad at remembering to book time off, sometimes going months and months before taking a break. It's something that I've gotten worse at during the pandemic. In my mind, I reduce the importance of any time off by telling myself, "I can't go anywhere anyway!".
It's a weird way of thinking because time off during the pandemic has actually felt less stressful than during 'normal' times. You can't go anywhere or see anyone, so there's no expectation that you need to make the most of your break by doing something every single day.
Sounds like good downtime. Now, if I can just remember to spread the rest of my annual leave evenly throughout the rest of the year...
I've made a change to my Ghost theme: each post is now rendered in full on the index page, instead of displaying an excerpt.
Why do this? Well, I wanted my posts to be more like notes; quick thoughts and observations that come to me throughout the day. Most of these 'notes' will be just a hundred words or so. A longer excerpt, essentially.
I also prefer the visual variety of different length posts. Scrolling down the homepage is now more interesting because each post isn't restricted to a particular character count.
Should I want to write a lengthier post I simply tag it as an article. The loop in my Ghost theme will then display an excerpt for that post, rather than the entire post contents.
We're officially halfway through the year... so let's take a look at what goals I set myself (original post) and how I'm getting on with them:
Be less reliant on Chrome ✅
Post at least once a week ❌
Significantly improve JavaScript knowledge ❌
Continue to grow as a designer (ongoing)
Broaden front end skills (ongoing)
Be less reliant on Chrome
Let's start with the good news:
I'd been a long time admirer of Firefox and in particular, its Developer Tools. They're also a not-for-profit and you get a lot of additional privacy and cookie blocking out-of-the-box. A no-brainer, really.
Switching was easy, with a quick export of bookmarks from Chrome. I don't really use bookmarks anymore. At the very least I need to sort through them. Maybe.
Had one slight hiccup with Firefox whereby the 1Password plugin I was using stopped working. However, I eventually found a solution for it.
Yet here we are in week 23 of 2020 and I've posted just 6 times (and one of those was the 'Goals for 2020' post). Yikes.
This one is frustrating as it should be easy. One post a week is not a huge amount of work, especially when it can simply be just documenting something cool or interesting that I've seen or read about online.
I really want to get to the end of the year with at least 52 posts in 2020. Content volume has always been a sticking point on this site and from now on I would like 52 posts to be the minimum amount of new content posted per year.
Significantly improve JavaScript knowledge
The lack of any progress on this goal is probably the most disappointing of them all. Improving past a basic knowledge of JavaScript has always been something that I've wanted to achieve and it constantly gets put off.
I recently signed up to Dan Abramov's Just JavaScript for more daily snippets and have been enjoying the content so far.
I'll be making a conscious effort to make sure a considerable portion of my weekly posts are JavaScript related from now on.
Broaden front end skills
As this is an ongoing goal it's hard to quantify it. There won't ever be a point where I look back and say that I'm happy where I am - I can always learn more.
CSS continues to be a keen interest and I'm excited to see how my knowledge of CSS Grid (in particular) grows and what it enables me to do in the browser.
This particular goal will also be vastly improved if I can nail down the previous goal of becoming more competent with JavaScript. This is definitely a priority.
Continue to grow as a designer
Recently, my work has had more of a front end focus. I haven't had to design much from scratch. But, design is so much more than that and there has still been plenty of opportunity to improve my UX knowledge and help clients understand the reasoning behind certain design decisions.
As with broadening my skills, this is a goal that won't ever be finished. But it's always worth reflecting on how far you have come and challenging yourself to keep improving.
Conclusion
Quite a bit has changed since the start of the year. I feel like a six month review is probably not frequent enough to keep tabs on my progress, as things can easily fall by the wayside if not regularly checked.
Quarterly reviews would be better but probably still isn't enough. So, I'm going to start doing monthly reviews. This will give me a chance to review the work I've done and the things I've posted, whilst they're still fresh in my mind.