Analysing life trends
23 May 2023
One of the reasons I began journalling and tracking my “vitals” is for analysing trends in my mood and lifestyle. To help achieve this, I capture a summary alongside my journal entries in the form of tags.
Writing (page 4)
Interviewing, but better
3 May 2023
Interviewing has to be one of those universal activities no one enjoys. Whether you’re the interviewer or the interviewee, there’s a shared dread involved with being on show for 30, 60, 90 minutes. I’ve come to learn being on both sides of the fence that an interview is as much an audition for the company as it is for the prospective employee.
When a tweak becomes a refactor
18 Apr 2023
I recently wanted to make a change to the fitness page on my site. To hide football activities from appearing in run data, in my code there is a rudimentary check that rejects any run activities logged on a Monday (when I regularly play football).
Sleep: the war wages on
3 Apr 2023
In February I shared how my attempt to improve my sleep was going so far this year. TL;DR: not great. I pondered my hang-ups and set some targets to improve things. Now, at the beginning of April, I'm checking in on the first quarter of the year.
Using Google Sheets as a data source in Eleventy
13 Mar 2023
In part one, we used a script to setup to sync our transient Letterboxd RSS feed to Google Sheets for some permenance. In part two we'll look into reading this spreadsheet and outputting the data onto a page using Eleventy. Then we'll take a look at the underlying class doing all the work: CachedSpreadsheet.
Sync your Letterboxd film data with Google Sheets & Eleventy
1 Mar 2023
I like watching films, and I like keeping track of what I watch. I’ve done this for some years via Letterboxd, a decent little app for accomplishing this task, including reviewing what you watch and keeping a to-watch list.
I wanted to integrate with Letterboxd on my website so I could “own” my reviews in case the service went kaput. That lead me to 2 options: integrate with their API, or consume the personalised XML feed URL they provide.
Set your new features free with flags
23 Feb 2023
Two big issues plague software development teams, and funnily enough they can seem at odds to each another. The first, the more obvious, technical debt. Old code that’s grown stale and probably wasn’t written by anyone still working on the codebase. No one’s sure what it does or whether it’s still necessary, but it still “works” and certain tests require it to be there to pass.
Derek Sivers and the power of simplicity
10 Feb 2023
I first heard about Derek Sivers when I read his first book, Anything You Want. It’s a wonderfully simple and short book where he talks about his journey from musician to entrepreneur, in the building and eventual selling of his e-commerce business CD Baby.
Sleep: how it's going
7 Feb 2023
I set a goal for 2023 to improve my sleep. Suitably vague, but one of the steps I implemented in January was simply to track my bedtime. My Garmin watch approximates this but I’ve been annoyed by how inaccurate this often is if I have a lower paced evening. So, I now simply jot that time down to the nearest 5 minutes in my journal.
Book Review: Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
30 Jan 2023
I found this book to be so relatable and ridiculously readable. The very definition of a page-turner. I finished it in 13 days, reading most evenings, a considerably quicker pace than is typical for me. In this review are a few of my highlights from the book, with some of my commentary alongside.