Weeknotes 2024 W12 W13

The past two weeks have been a constant reminder of just how much I enjoy the freedom of owning my own website.

Jeremy’s post What the world needs was a lovely reminder that not everything has to measure up to expectations. Whether that be your own, other people’s, or the broader impact on the planet.

I’m writing for myself. I write to figure out what I think. I also publish mostly for myself—a public archive for future me.

I fully agree with Jeremy here. My digital garden resembles the physical one outside my backdoor: imperfect, somewhat neglected but my own little place of sanctuary to grow my thoughts and play with ideas. Things are half finished or a work in progress but I’m fine with that. I’ll get around to some weeding weeding eventually or maybe even find time to plant a tree.

I began to catch up on what I missed at Indie Webcamp 2024. I was green with envy reading Ana’s write-up. It sounded like there was some excellent discussions, demos and making over the two days. After reading of her success with IndieKit I’m determined to pick up where I left over the coming weeks.

Last Sunday watched the final of the March Sumo in Osaka. I made bingo card but completely failed to keep up with the results. Again, I’m okay with that. Its taught me that I might need to try something different. In an ideal world I’d like to find a source of the daily match data online, perhaps in a json file, and use that to build the card daily.

I attended the March UXup meetup in Brighton. It was a wonderful night meeting new people curious about research and catching up with some familiar faces. I ended up chatting at the back with the lovely Chris Harding. We jotted down our back-channel conversation using post-its so not to disturb the other attendees. At the end of the night I picked up the pile rather than throw them away as a lot of what we talked about. Who knows, I might turned into a blog post at some point so I can refer back to it at some point.

I spent some time setting up the open source karaoke software Ultra Star Deluxe for a special celebration last Thursday. The software is a kludge, which for me was part of the charm, and relies on a community of people to create plain text files for the timings of the lyrics, audio and video. There were times then I needed to find solutions to an issue with settings. I wouldn’t have been able to do solve those problems without people sharing their experience, solutions and explanations on their own websites. I’ll find some time to write up my own notes and publish them here. Having a platform to reciprocate knowledge is what I love about the internet. No login required here, just free exchange of honest thought and content.

Stu Robson joined Clearleft for a short contract that needs some front-end and design system expertise. He blooped about an old celebration feed on his website where he would mark a career milestone with a photos of a slice of cake. I absolutely loved this idea and immediately created celebrating to my own website.

I spent last week working closely with Luke Hay to handover the sixth and final research study in a small programme of continuous research we’ve been delivering for a client at Clearleft. There’s been lots of learnings from the ongoing work that I’m keen to write about, particularly some thoughts on running a pilot test before speaking to recruited research participants.

I had a nerdy exchange of bloops with John Willshire about sourdough bread making. It was a great reminder to publish my own same-day-bake method for others to follow.

I read Craig Mod’s post about AI Pin and got curious. After watching the two most recent videos I have questions and thoughts. Some are serious, others sarcastic. Expect some of those over the coming weeks.