Category: links

Weeknotes 2025×04

Posted on by graham

Running around, lacking the time to write something more structured this week. Here are some back-of the-mental-envelope notes from loose memory to keep the streak.

This week I’ve largely been digging into optimising a slowish site and, reader, I have been LOVING it. Index this, rewrite that, chop this, cache that. Summarise logs, chase down charts, Make Things Go Zoom. In theory, at least. Still need to test a few changes in the real world, but there’s an indescribable rush in looking over a software system and knowing it can be Better, and that people will like it when it’s Better.

Which has meant a proper, actual LAMPy “full stack” set of skills, from bash scripting to server management to SQL EXPLAINs to profiling code in WordPress. Hopefully a lot of it will get overhauled in the next few months anyway, and this is valuable familiarisation work too.

Been balancing that with looking after the CIC org reigns and making sure everyone on the team and various partners have what they need, get responses, and feel reassured. An increase in emails to keep on top of, basically.

Another week where I sillily (is that a word?) still didn’t release a funding page for my sketchbook challenge 🙄 And/but I did register for the Playdate Winter game jam so now have an idea rolling round my head and notebook, a proof-of-concept in place, and Yet Another Project for the week ahead 🙄🙄 It’ll be fine. Fun, even.

Other notes from the week.

  • Carried on watching more of Tarkovsky’s Stalker (free on Youtube)
  • I’m trying to reassemble all the Lego pieces for my Ninjago lighthouse set which have been merged into the Great Lego Sea. I’ve got a sheet and tick system now, and the process has gone from chaotic and frustrating to being strangely therapeutic.
  • Replaced a Gameboy Zelda Link’s Awakening battery to breathe fresh life into its monochrome lungs.
  • Managed to keep the Tamagotchi alive another week.

Things I’ve been reading:

Ta-ta!

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.

Weeklinks 2024-03-15

Posted on by graham

Things being published

Overview of an image by Richard Littler, showing a hand drawn shelving unit with may items in very fine detail.

Who am I anyway

"My goal is to strip away anything that takes the focus away from my subject. My tip would be to only do what is necessary to convey the feeling you want in a photograph" (Black & White Photography magazine 200)

Some amazing portraits on his site, such as the one below, but also I’m thinking a bit about how the idea of "feeling" comes first here. How can this be applied to other aspects of life too?

Portrait of a person covered with a long hood, staring straight into the camera with a neutral expression.

  • This is hitting home hard right now: Being Glue, or the value of generalisation and joining-the-dots, and how it largely goes against how we see careers and job roles.

  • Nice quote: "Whenever you try to change an organisation it’s important to remember that the pace of change will feel glacial to those trying to effect the change, while at the same time feeling rapid and relentless to those affected by it."

Future lives

Numbers

Two stick people talking. One says "When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric." The other replies, "Sounds bad. Let's offer a bonus to anyone who identifies a metric that has become a target."

Handhelds

Deprecated. Too Depressing

Weeklinks 2024-02-23

Posted on by graham

What’s been beeping the radar the last few weeks?

Cross the disciplines

Climate and feedback loops and fish food

Energy and efficiency

Software security

Random tales

Weeklinks 2024-02-09

Posted on by graham

Making an effort to post these links more regularly, but my track record for routine isn’t the greatest.