Back in September and October last year I had a weekly thing of writing up my week in posts (I was blogging more frequently then), projects (what I was up to!) and pins (things I had bookmarked).
It was a really good discipline and I enjoyed doing it (even if it didn’t benefit anyone else), so inspired by Andy Bell, who was in turn inspired by Paul Robert Lloyd, I’m trying to get back into it.
Projects: what I’ve been up to
- Generally after a slow start to the year, work is starting to come in. I’ve been reviewing spec’s and working up a proposal for a new Laravel project.
- I finished off a custom WordPress-to-MailChimp integration that needed to be added to a past project that I worked on.
- I’ve been helping my friends at Hands Up finish off some last minute snags on a custom WordPress build.
- I’ve had the usual background load of fixing other people’s hosting, DNS and coding issues – as someone with a strong(er-than-average) networking and hosting background I pick up a lot of this stuff.
- In side-project land I’ve been making a bit of progress with SchoolBot, adding a few commands, some back-end admin stuff that’s been needed for ages and starting to add some randomness/fun/politeness to the bot’s tone of voice. I’ve also actually posting some useful information about it on Twitter. I still need to make a marketing/landing page for it and to try to recruit a forward-thinking tech-savvy school that may want to pilot it at some point.
Posts: things I made
I’ve not posted to the blog this week, but following Paul Jarvis’s “Greatest Hits” idea I don’t see why I shouldn’t surface some old stuff and things that were posted in the “gap” of my week-notes:
- My new CSS framework: SUCSS – I’ve never been happy with how people do CSS. I always thought there was a missing middle-ground between all the frameworks and techniques. Maybe I found it? Includes my history with CSS and some ideas about how I may try and drop CSS build tools entierly.
- Not all software development processes are equal: In which I summon up the courage to add my own experiences to that of a software engineering legend. Ultimately I agree with him, but the illustration he chooses may not be the best and I hopefully add some insight into a software world you may not be familiar with!
Pins: things I read and remembered
- Quick Look Plugins: A list of MacOS/Finder Quick Look plugins for developers
- SecurityCheckli.st: A list of things you can do to improve your online security and privacy. Really nicely done too!
- Laravel Mailbox: A package for handling INCOMING mail in Laravel. Marcel is brilliant and prolific and this latest tool looks as brilliant as ever.
- autocomplete.js: Nice-looking JS autocomplete library
- terminal.sexy: I hate to think what this will do for my SEO, but here’s a nice interactive tool for creating and editing terminal/command-line colour schemes (via Jenny Wong)
- Swindon Heritage Trail mobile app with AR: I had ideas to develop Zap the Map to do trails, but looks like the lovely Carto Group people are doing a better job and beating me to it!
- Echo (Go Framework): I’m slowly starting out on the journey of learning the Go language (inspiration here and here). Gabor kindly pointed me to Echo which will almost certainly help!
- Notable: I’m not about to ditch Bear, but if I was this open source, cross-platform (but not mobile) Markdown note editor looks great.
Have a great week!