Category: daynotes

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.

Existential Daynotes: Hardcore Hope Navigation

Posted on by graham

("Day notes" is a misnomer in some ways. You don’t have to write notes every day, but the act of writing for the day can be useful in itself. A temporary space to pause, to gather thoughts and weave them into something new. There doesn’t need to be rhythm of cadence to this, other than the rhythms of your own practice.)

Going through an old notebook yesterday, I found a slip of paper that I’d written the following words on in capital letters: "HARDCORE HOPE NAVIGATION."

They had rung out at me at the time, enough to give them their own space. And after a busy month leading to another busy, and somewhat uncertain month, Hope is something fully, delicately on the radar currently.

A lot of people seem to be are having rough times at the moment. There’s a faintly British legacy psyche of putting up with it I think, but a lot of it seems more existential than just getting through a bad patch. Omnishambles is turning into Permashambles. Demographically, we have yet to acknowledge the true cost of a retired population. Democratically, individuals are becoming more powerful than nations. Economically, global capitalism is running out of road in a lot of places. Systemically, there is a big question mark over the state of our combined health – of people, places, and the planet.

Like a lot of people, I’m caught up in the effects of all that too. I worry about how best to apply myself, but have trouble committing to a single direction when everything is so interconnected. I feel caught between the experience I’ve accrued, and the challenge of new innovation as well as new problems that we face – and in my mind, new solutions (oh hello AI) do nothing to fix either the existing issues, or embed critical thinking about new ones that they create, or amplify.

I feel pretty trapped, to be honest. I want to tread a path of simplicity and natural acceptance, but the more we rely on consumerist, middle class identities combined with increasing costs and systemic risks, the more we’re going to panic as a society, and the more we’re going to fragment and fight.

So this is where Hardcore Hope Navigation comes in, and why I’m finding it hard to position my own self right now. There are ways through this, but it’ll take a lot of collective willpower to see things differently. Some amazing people are already working in this space, but the forces against them are inexplicably massive. Maybe I should just write about it more? Maybe there’s scope to open up and Do The Weaving more than I currently do.

Open questions seem like a good place to end a day note.

Daynotes 2023-07-05: “Mind” as brain gardener

Posted on by graham

Feeling different this week as I continue to read "The Middle Path of Life" (see previous post); it seems to trigger some latent meditative states of mind in me, back from when I actually used to practice sitting. In particular, I am detaching from stresses slightly more, being more comfortable with my own tiredness, and – particularly of note – discovering a perspective that is akin to a mental "gardener" than the brain itself.

Ie. If we treat the brain as a processing machine – or something more organic, such as the ecosystem of a tree – then the mind (the reflective surface, rather than the conscious and rational brain or the emotional ego) the mind can be detached as a kind of mechanic, gardener or host role. It can create the conditions for activity to happen, without getting involved in the activity itself. It can act as a scrum master, a distant but loving parent, the scrubber in front of a curling stone. This pattern is everywhere in life, yet we ignore it for ourselves.

The brain may be stressed due to too much work, for example. The forceful mind drives the brain to work harder, but the reflective and supportive mind asks what might help identify and relieve that stress. That might take the form of external actions (speaking to someone to rearrange spec, or deadline) or it might be internal (reassessing priorities, doing something distracting, or so on).

That’s just one example – I’m wary of equating mindfulness with productivity and used that just because I’m heading to my place of work today, but it equally applies to all relationships with the world and the people in it.

The bus has unexpectedly halted before my intended destination. I may be late. Never mind. The growl of the bus engine has gone. Out in the distance, I see scaffolding the fluffy clouds of morning.

Daynotes 2023-06-29: Meditative everyday work

Posted on by graham

Woke up at 5.20, went back to sleep. Woken up at 6.20, went back to sleep. Dreamed the world was ending but nobody really knew how to react, so everyone carried on as normal. I was worried that people didn’t realise they had to say goodbye to their kids properly when they sent them off to school, as they wouldn’t see them again.

Dreams don’t do punctuation.

A large, rectangular white and yellow building-like structure is obscured by close up detail of raindrops on a window.

Nearly June end. At the start of the month, I took a day out to think a little about where I’m at with freelancing and life in general. I haven’t got round to a better write-up yet, but the big cha(lle)nge I took away from it was a need to work more "mindfully" – that is, to move from a productive-but-mundane approach of following a list of tasks, to a process and routine that "bakes in" the longer term values that are important to me.

It’s one thing working in the field of what I’m calling "long term tech", but it’s another to stick to it in the detail of everyday life. So figure out ways to bring it all together.

Tangentially, this week’s new book is "The Middle Path of Life" by Dhiravamsa. The first few chapters have dug into why meditation is important, and how it requires a shift from an "unconscious" form of behaviour (modern everyday life, the ego, etc) to an approach grounded in "curious awareness" (or maybe "aware curiosity?").

I think this can act as a pivot point for working differently and more mindfully. I started trying to plan out not just what I was doing for the day when it started, but also the things I wanted to be conscious of when doing the work – for long term tech, this often means a lot of good practice, such as decent documentation, clean code, keeping people informed, and so on. (Separate blog post/book/etc…)

Like meditation, this proactive planning is hard to keep up in busy periods, but it’s really all about the practice, not the ritual. If I’m aware that I’m not doing something, this is sometimes more important than making the time to actually do it.

The rain has come and everything smells of overwhelmingly of tarmac.

Daynotes 2023-06-27

Posted on by graham

New day. New day notes. New day notes file.

Large gap. 1 month. Inner sanctum, closed off to the world. Busy, concentrating, focused, busy.

Many things. New routines. Even the physical manifest is empty last week:

Black and white photo of a double-page spread of an empty planner book, opened at a week in June.

Why is this?

Think. Reflect. Purpose of day notes.

Progress on projects. Feeling productive. Urge to deliver. P’raps it’s the solstice, early suns, fresh breeze.

Or maybe it’s remote working. Digital nomadicism, stuffed backpack. Not carrying the heavy diary, running off scraps of paper instead. Micro to-do lists, piling up in pockets like emails and browser tabs. Urge to clear out.

The perennial question – how important is reflection? Does it matter if I don’t blog? What makes me feel satisfied at the day’s end?

Deep dives into creative work are good. Balance between projects and everyday life is a necessity. Are these inherently in conflict with each other? No point in trying to achieve satisfaction?

Two endpoints, two possibles. 1) A world of North Stars and focal points, clear aims and small milestones. 2) A chaos of directions, do-what-you-can, but accept not that it must be stressful, but that multiplicity is simply an alternative state.

Either way, trust that things are bound together as one; somehow. This is the meeting point, the source of it all.