A year of weeknotes - weeknotes #52

One year writing these notes.

When I started, I was very much trying to go back to work, struggling to find more than a few hours here and there.

Since then:

• I found work 🎉 and negotiated my rate and conditions with different kinds of clients,
• I got to say no to assignments for various reasons,
• When it got too busy or difficult, I set boundaries and made time for flexibility and family (the huge perks of this lifestyle),
• And since today, I lived through the difficulty of having to dump a client.

A year into this notes is as good a time as any to think about these full-time employment opportuinities that arise every so often. It would mean no more admin, no more thinking I’m “losing” a day’s wages when I’m doing things for myself. Ah well, I’ll choose on merit of each opportuinity.

Convergence and coincidence at Global Witness: several avenues to slimming down our cloud infra opened up at the same time. I’m trying to concentrate (centralise?) non-essential, let’s-try-it-for-a-few-month services instead of running each little thing on its own VPS. Bad for the environment, bad for maintenance, bad for the monthly bill.

I also want to move an old (five years?) app which is hosted on a single VPS to a, how do I put this, more modern and less costly stack. Problem is I don’t know much PHP, so it’s kind of a tricky task.

Bit of frustration working on this ClojureScript project for Deutsche Welle. One of the central promises of the language and the tooling is this REPL companion, which seamlessy fits into REPL-aware text editors and which allows you to play around, modify state, and never really reload your app and replay actions to achieve the same state.

Niko was on holiday and I couldn’t get the bits I needed to work. So I was back on a livereload-y setup, tweaking something and replaying the actions in browser to see how I liked the change…

For the first time since the little one was born, I played a full weekend of bike polo at a little tournament in Berlin. Was good to be outside for so much of the day, even though I should really do some strength exercise: the gear ratio felt high and the mallet heavy…