Weeknotes 2025×03

Posted on by graham

This week has been a real mixed one, it must be said. Various bits of bad news, culminating in the news of David Lynch leaving us overshadowing the Switch 2 launch, if I’m honest. There was worse news from a close friend, and taxes featured heavily. But, determined to stay positive, it’s also been a busy and productive week. What happened?

  • Last Friday evening saw the news about the WordPress sustainability being disbanded/discarded and Hannah posted a great follow-up along with Chris Adam’s thoughts. I have mixed feelings on the question of whether and how WordPress should organise around sustainability, but right now I’m just a bit sick of the trend towards one bloke making sudden, sweeping decisions in the world that impact a whole bunch of people just trying to do good work.
  • Another Monday morning strategy and planning check-in with myself – in a field up the road this time, instead of a cosy cafe. More refinement of last week’s thoughts – I converted the rough list into three threads: Creative control, Clarity & Confidence, and Scaling up.I don’t know whether these are “pillars”, “OKRs” or a more general approach to navigation, but they’re useful – and as a single, self-employed person, it’s nice not to have to justify the approach taken. Maybe all these management approaches get that fundamentally wrong – are things like OKRs and North Stars and etc etc just tools for the leader/manager to help them organise their own thoughts? Is the proof in then being able to communicate ideas to others in a human way, not in a way that requires a bunch of background reading and swallowing a pill?
Photo of a large, old barn building beside a field. The barn has a blocked up window, and a white circular pattern painting on the side.
Monday’s office view
  • I continued taking small, incremental steps along my marketing route by thinking about testimonials a little more. Caroline very kindly shared her feedback form with me and while I could just copy and paste the questions there, I’m thinking about what kind of feedback is right for me, at the moment, and I decided to keep the whole thing small by just focusing on testimonials rather than, you know, actual honest-to-god feedback for now.
  • Last year’s work with Helpful Digital wrapped up with a last few tweaks to my work on their Social Simulator product. It’s been really good helping the team to modernise aspects of the code and make things (hopefully) more flexible and easier to work with – well worth a look if you’re after social scenarios and comms-team testing and training.
  • I’m starting some new client work on a WordPress plugin following an audit of the codebase over the last month, which I’m really looking forward to getting my teeth into. This week I ended up doing my tax return and some invoicing, which took a bit longer than expected. Combined with some urgent tech support meant that the originally planned work will need to start in earnest next week, but it does feel really good to get the taxes submitted. I might even promise myself to sort this year’s out by May…?
  • Had a lovely chat with a second-year undergrad looking for advice and a chat about careers in data and tech. Felt like I was being interviewed at times, which was weird and fun, and a chance to reminisce a bit. It’s funny, but also nice that a lot of questions people have at the start of their career still feel like they apply to me now – like anything to do with what skills to learn, how to learn, figuring out the industry and networking, and – most of all – deciding what it is you actually want to do. It’s also really nice to pass some experience on, so I figure I should make more of an effort to do this for the next generation, maybe do some more informal mentoring. If you’re reading this and know anyone that might be interested in chatting about tech careers, do get in touch!
  • Had a quick chat about a new project proposal, which was a good opportunity to revisit and try out my new approach to breaking down my sustainability consulting offers, which ties back in with that clarity & confidence thing above. Also rewrote a bunch of blurb from a previous proposal which was overly-wordy, and pretty pleased with the change there, which is a lot simpler and more client-focused. Definitely feel like I’m happier talking about the need, impact and appropriateness of energy considerations at the moment.

Misc

Creating:

  • Wednesday was a bit of a day, so I finished up by chilling out with Pulp’s little music editor to create a tune inspired by the Wii U’s friend list screen. If you don’t feel better after listening to that, there’s no hope left.
  • Trying to get my head back into the sketchbook challenge I signed up for a few months, ago. Enjoying putting pen to paper, but I still need to set up a sponsorship page, and ask around. Plus there do seem to be a lot of pages left to fill…
A handdrawn black and white line-drawing picture with floating cubes, a brutalist lighthouse, and a sea filled with fish.
A collaborative effort, this one.

Reading:

Not been able to dig into my reading backlog as much this week, but these got a read. The Cory Doctorow interview is definitely worth a look.

Playing:

  • Badminton, for the first time in months! My legs hurt today, but not as much as I thought they would.
  • has got us back into Boomerang Fu on the Switch. Fast and frantic, and now with a slower-paced but still surprisingly exciting Hide and Seek mode.

Watching:

  • The Traitors, mostly.

Listening:

Finally, I’m determined to clean up some of my old files, starting with my “random downloads” folder. Sorting and deleting these has been worth it – so easy to forget how … tiring having chaff lying around is. Must. Get. Tidier.

All for now. Enjoy your weekend (especially if you’re heading along to UKGovCamp!)

Weeknotes 2025-02

Posted on by graham

It’s been a while since I wrote any weeknotes, but I’m feeling pretty positive about freelancing at the moment. I don’t know if I’ll keep this up, but I figure it’s still a good practice, even if I tend to be more private around client work these days.

Monday: Back with aplomb

A lot of enthusiasm built up over the holidays, and a itching to crack on with freelancing. No real resolutions this year, just improving my own approach to business. Opted to come into Brighton, and spent a really nice first hour with a coffee and cake, thinking through the Road Ahead. Two basic questions: 1. What would I really like from the year ahead? (A focused list, not a wishlist.) and 2. What are the current challenges?

Keywords emerging were around certainty (about work and pipline), clarity (about what I can offer and how to do things), and focus (coming out of the previous two). 2024 was knackering in various ways, and I decided I don’t need to make that the status quo.

So, 2025 – getting better at being confident, marketing myself and finding clients, aiming bigger, and riding the wave of enthusiasm I’ve been feeling since October.

Spent a little time translating the plans into electronic version, including setting up a “map” to help structure all my thoughts, including work offered, and blog post subjects. Tending to organise into various areas of Software Health (such as code structure, security, carbon footprint etc), and then dividing these up by project lifetime (inception and needs gathering, design, build, maintenance, etc).

Tuesday, Wednesday: Spreadsheets and snow

Largely getting my head back into some work from before Christmas, auditing a somewhat creaky codebase and getting a decently documented overview of the differences between many branches. Part of auditing work is getting familiar with it, and that often means going back over the same code repeatedly, as more and more of the project’s history clicks into place. Archaeology in action. Spent a good session thinking through remedial steps, collating tasks into stages with dependencies, and estimating rough time for each. Bosh. Nice.

There was snow in Brighton on Wednesday. I left early to minimise the risk of not-making-it-home. Sadly Seaford seems to be the least snowy place in all England.

Thursday: Loose ends and soup

Went back to client with a summary of work done, and the clarity and thoroughness look to be paying off.

Also tried to continue some “daily business development” by jotting down a few blog post ideas into the map matrix above. Also finalised and published content changes to the Groundlake website to reflect my divergence from just greentech into software health more generally. 2025 is all about small, incremental, agile changes.

Replied to someone asking about career advice in the ethical data space, was nice to be asked and thinking about whether to offer to mentor more young people going forwards.

Exploded my soup in the microwave, but only a little.

Shared my game console power usage data sheet which garnered some interest, so updated it a little.

The kerfuffle around the WordPress sustainability team being disbanded was a frustrating non-surprise. I’m heavily thinking about coming up with a framework to assess tech stacks based on social factors such as ownership and policy, as well as on the usuals like security status. Good side project for 2025, I think.

Friday: Backups and chores

Had a few life chores to attend to so a disrupted day, productivity-wise. I did some digging into a failing backup for a client, and managed to set up an rclone connection to my pCloud account though, so I can start targeting some local folders for better off-site backups. I’ll need to run some batches overnight to catch up, as uploads tend to max out the home network. Maybe it’s time to consider fibre…?

Misc

Reading:

I’ve been making more of an attempt to read longer articles on my Kindle this year. Recent highlights have been:

Playing:

  • Been really enjoying The Case of the Golden Idol over Christmas, via Waydroid on the SteamDeck and Netflix’s access to the game. Main story done, moving on to the bonus chapters now.
  • Digging into the backlog by picking out In Other Waters. There’s a nice ambience to it so far, but I got slightly confused, missed a useful bit, and think I’m stuck now so will probably restart it. Seems a shame to have to do so, but I guess I’ll only lose an hour’s worth of play, and it looks intriguing enough to give a second chance.

Phew! Writing stuff down makes me realise how much I’ve done sometimes – that’s a reward in itself. Here’s hoping I carry on next week.

Do we have a civil duty to re-design social media platforms?

Posted on by graham

Do we have a civil duty to re-design social media platforms? Some open thoughts to start exploring the topic.

Or, to rephrase that: Is there a civil duty for civilians to design civility into our use of the social internet?

(Being deliberately aware of using the term "civil" extensively here – civility, civilian, civil as a whole. This is to draw attention to the overlap between the terms, and the ambiguity between them. Are civilians always civil? Are civilisations?)

Some fragments:

  1. The accepted narrative is that social media profits from anger and hate, which is largely true, but risks ignoring the wider notion that we humans engage with all extremes of emotions. We remain drawn to content which inspires us, calms us, and makes us laugh as much as we are to what makes us angry. (Perhaps we just remember the negative stuff for longer.)

  2. I started using Twitter in 2007 to keep in touch via SMS, before data was ubiquitous. A friend had moved to France, and it was genuinely exciting being able to text him for free (not 20p a message) by just using "DM" at the start of a text message.

  3. Twitter grew rapidly from a network to an algorithm to a business, but at its heart was the idea of being able to post "interesting things", like spotting a monkey. Similarly, Flickr had its "Interestingness" algorithm which everyone in the photography scene was trying to decipher. It was clear that being connected was less important than being famous from this point. Being favourited was less important than being reposted.

  4. This struggle to be interesting is still where we’re at now, it has become a way of life once we step into the public sphere. But we cannot separate out factually interesting from emotionally interesting content – facts confirm desires and passions are formed from observations. Second, we cannot separate out "good" interesting from "bad" interesting – for every anger-inducing content there is something funny, hopefully, shocking, cute. The dichotomy is not between good and bad, but been being entertained and bored.

  5. So we remain stuck in this vicious loop of wanting to seek out the good stuff, but getting all the while annoyed by the bad stuff, but being unable to step away from any of it. In civil participation terms – a seemingly antiquated term? – this is akin to wandering around our local community and only engaging with the people shouting the loudest, or being the most egregious, the most unruly, the most effervescent. It is to ignore the quiet, the reliable and, very often, the people closest to us.

  6. Local democracy in the UK (and possibly elsehere) is in a precarious place now, with local governance being hollowed out through the twin effects of austerity and the rise of alternative, privately-owned networks. It is much easier to partiicpate in global polls of no value than it is to engage with the complicated and charged landscape of local politics.

  7. Does this represent a giving-up, then? Are we relieved that local decisions, despite not being what we would like, are actually taken out of our hands, for whatever reason?

  8. Or is there an alternative to X as the "global town square"? Has there always been an alternative, just we never got round to giving it any attention? Is there an appetite for doing politics differently at this level – or is it too late? Are we happy with just shouting at each other from long distances.

  9. Distance is a good way to think about it. Of the people that you know, in person, have met face-to-face, how many decisions are shared between you, that you jointly participate in? Can we map domains of influence to domains of contact in this way? Can we make democracy – co-deliberation, meaningful votes, sustainable feedback – something that we implement daily, not just take for granted?

  10. In among all the clamour to make coutries "great" "again", we have lost what it means to be a citizen of that country. What do we expect of each other, of our representatives, of ourselves? And when people fail to meet those expectations, how can we capture that and turn it into something positive?

  11. Instead of grunting and accepting the world as beyond help and beyond change.

  12. How can we design our networks to give us back some faith in others?

Am I just rehashing arguments from 20 years ago? Have I missed anything? Where do we go from here? Drop me a line on Mastodon or Bluesky.

Other reading:

Midweek thoughts on Samhain and Governance

Posted on by graham
Saw 2 butterflies cavorting through the air yesterday. Outside now, fireworks pop in the dark, but it’s still not cold. More like early September in old weathers. Ha, “in old weathers”, a new phrase to track progress like “in old money” and “in olden times”. Myths but not memories.

Abundantly mixed energies this week, with the long stretch of a fresh illness finally catching up with me after going out for local drinks on Friday. Bad sleep, usually of my own making, on top of that. And today a pulled shoulder.

But blessings too. A small piece of work has come together nicely, and I have my head round CSS flexbox just that little more tightly, like a comfortable scarf. I dealt with a few last minute unexpecteds quickly and easily, which is often the bit I try to avoid most but also enjoy the most. Further work this week is lined up, after a trip up to London tomorrow for a conference.

I haven’t been to a conference in years, and I’ve ironed off a new shirt and hoping my ill doesn’t get too much in the way of enjoying the day, a day all about Governance. I’m going with my Writing Our Legacy hat on, but this is a field I’m rapidly wanting to get into more, philosophically and practically.

I enjoy governance, I’ve decided – or, more realistically, I’ve come to realise that I enjoy it. Governance comes down to goal-setting, decision-making, transparency and feedback loops, all tucked into a package of collaboration. The word itself doesn’t lend itself to me easily though, but then I realise I’ve been effectively doing governance for over a decade though. Decisions, oversight, correction, collaboration. Got a team? Want it to do well? Governance is where it’s at.

For me, governance ties in with my personal field of software systems. I’ve used the recent point of Samhain to take stock of where I am, and write up fresh thoughts. You can find them on my “now” page.

What is the future of the tech industry TNG?

Posted on by graham

Holy shit, stat of the day comes from this FT article (£) on jobs for graduates vs AI.

The ISE said graduate vacancies at the large employers it surveys had grown 4 per cent in the past year, compared with 6 per cent the previous year. But graduate hiring in the digital and IT sector fell 35 per cent, while in finance and professional services it was down 5 per cent.

Emphasis added because wow. I’m sure some of that isn’t just AI, but also wider tech cycles, but still.

I’m at an age where I think a lot about giving back to future generations, especially as my own kids get closer towards finding a job or a career or whatever you want to call it these days. A conversation the other day pointed out that people are more likely to use AI for menial tasks, which blocks off those in-roads that you’d normally take as a junior, as an intern, etc. This really made me think, especially alongside the push for Universities to have more industry links.

There’s a huge conflict going on here. Do businesses want to train people up, or don’t they? Do they even want human workers, or not – the overall push for AI and ML (oh, and de–unionising) seems to be decisively against this idea. Similarly people are having kids less, and at older ages (the parents, not the kids). But where does that leave us as an intergenerational society?

As we build hyper-automation into our lives, are we thinking about those that come after us as part of our decision-making? As with ecological concerns and resource usage, how many generations to come are we designing for? Or are we just taking what we can, and closing the door behind us?

Continuous Personal Development (or “Things I’ve Been Learning About”)

Posted on by graham

One of the things I’ve always enjoyed in my work is the opportunity to learn new things. Looking back, I feel slightly spoiled that, in my first job, we jumped between codebases and languages for different projects at a rate that most people would laugh at now – I’d work across Perl, ColdFusion, HTML, Javascript, ActionScript and more, all within a year. In the background I’d be personally playing around with Java, Linux admin, and god-knows-what-came-along.

The joy of technology for me has always been the challenge of … cajoling the systems to produce something of use and of value. Ends before means. It’s a fascination which continues 25 years on, that ever-present love-hate relationship with software and toolchains that accepts that you’re never, really, going to fully understand what’s going on. That you need to think on your feet, figure stuff out fast, absorb the docs almost intuitively, and make good things happen.

The last few months have been fairly technical, and I didn’t want to lose track of the variety of things I’ve been digging into, both for clients and for myself. Here’s a bit of a (definitely incomplete) list of some of the things I’ve been enjoying learning about and applying.

  • Trying out Nuclei Vulnerability scanner as a way to check for exploits on an old site.

  • POP chain exploits that use magic methods (such as __wakeup()) in PHP objects to run code.

  • The difference between CVSS and EPSS scores for assessing security risks.

  • Docker container setup, to get legacy sites running for development locally, as well as for throwing a new staging server together.

  • Replacing the inner door seal on a Bosch washer-dryer machine (which is the same as Siemens. The replacement part costs between £40 and… £120?). Labour is always 5 times what you expect.

  • In-depth TinyMCE hacking, including adding in a lot of custom code to implement drag-and-drop functionality for any files (not just images). And the licence differences between TinyMCE v6 (MIT) and v7 (GPLv2).

  • Javascript MutationObservers as a way to hang events off any changes to the DOM and styling, including CSS transitions. Related: The transitionend event.

  • Hooking into the DOM of the GoGoCarto mapping tool to do some in-depth (and probably somewhat fragile) UI changes.

  • httrack as a way of taking static copies of sites, but also learning that it’s important to pre-generate any images and files required for responsive display, and to copy those into place ahead of time as well. Always a trade-off.

  • The difference between em and ch units in CSS.

  • Passing messages between iframes using the postmessage() method, and combining it with scrollIntoView() to move an iframe fully on screen when interacting with it.

OK, these are all the technical things I’ve logged anyway. It’s harder to bullet point the softer skills around freelancing right now, but maybe that’s another post?