Well this week has felt like a continuation of last week (more like one long week with no obvious separation), and I’m been very much focusing on some changes to increase my productivity, and thinking more about how much I really value writing and I should do it more.
What I’ve been doing
I’ve been writing down the stuff I do for a while, in scribbled books, 1:1 notes or brag documents. As an alternative, this week I have started doing daily notes in Obsidian. Like many other I use a bit of a template for this, but it’s not too complicated. For obvious reasons, unlike weeknotes I won’t be posting my daily notes anywhere public but it does come in handy when taking the time to reflect on the week for these posts.
I also started this week working on scripts to scan out environments for out of date services, based on the amazing site endoflife.date. Keeping up-to-date on platforms, services, frameworks and applications is not easy feet in a single complex environment let alone in a managed service provider with thousands of customers. I’ve started to experiment with this service to see what value it can provide.
What I’ve been thinking about
I’ve had a few conversations with people this week about blogging and it’s many forms. It may be obvious if your reading this or anything else I’ve posted but I think blogging is really valuable, whether it’s a publicly-facing blog or an internal one. The value is writing things down what we work on and sharing it out there. I’m looking forward to continuing these conversations and encouraging a culture of writing within this organisation.
On the topic of writing, I have also been thinking about another post-type: the devlog. Over the past few months I’ve been back to writing bits of code, small scripts, automations and even the odd iOS shortcut. Oddly, the rest of my blog posts aren’t actually technical, so I thought I’d follow up with a different type of blog post when I can share at depth more technical things I am working on (like the endoflife.date things I mentioned above). Maybe I’ll see how that goes for a while.
What I’ve been reading
If you’ve seen my blogroll you’ll know that I subscribe to a couple of sections of arxiv.org and get a lot of computer science and AI white papers in my RSS feed. While I’m now started going through my backlog. I’ve even set myself a recurring task to remember to read at least 5 a week. I am sure some more interesting ideas and topics will emerge from this.
What I’ve been listening to
- A Bit Of Optimism podcast with freediver Li Karlsen - a great podcast about fear, stress and how nose breathing can help manage it.
What I’ve been doing in the real world
Well this week was an interesting family milestone. After having had a Ukrainian family staying in our home for 2 years, we finally said good bye to them as they moved into their own home. It came with mixed emotions and our house felt massive and just a bit weird for a few days, but I am very happy for them.