Category: Uncategorized

Well here we are, I’m sitting at a keyboard and the date is 2023. It’s quite a nice year to type to be honest, a certain flick of the fingers to it, and slightly easier than the repeated keypresses of 2022.

I ended the year in a gentle fashion. Once the rains of yesterday morning had wrapped up their charade, I went for a short walk along Eastbourne’s seafront, out of town and down past the wooden groynes to where the cliffs start.

I walked by myself, in and out of my own thoughts and other people’s dogs. Many years ago, I read that the most important meeting you can have is with yourself, and I let my mind wander of its own accord as I pushed through the strong winds ahead.

Realising anarchism

Two "realisations" remained with me as I walked back into town with the wind at my back.

First, I am actually more … "fiercely individualistic" than I would otherwise think. Not that I hate other people, or working with others – quite the opposite. More that I desire some level of control over my own life, in terms of both the creative side of what to do, and the structural side of how to do it.

It feels somewhat "selfish" to admit this, perhaps, but at the same time it’s important to understand what drives oneself, and also helps explain a lot of my own philosophy, including leaning to a liberal-anarchist politic, through to the importance of mutual respect, mutual aid, and distributed and equal learning and opportunities. This quote from Errico Malatesta sums it up well:

“By definition an anarchist is he who does not wish to be oppressed nor wishes to be him self an oppressor; who wants the greatest well-being, freedom and development for all human beings. His ideas, his wishes have their origin in a feeling of sympathy, love and respect for humanity: a feeling which must be sufficiently strong to induce him to want the well-being of others as much as his own…” — Errico Malatesta

Over time, I’ve ended up working in smaller and smaller companies, and going freelance feels like a continuation of this trend. It’s been hard work mentally at times, to not have a lot of the safety net of an employer, but I can’t deny that I enjoy setting my own destiny and not having to negotiate a lot of daily routine with bosses and HR departments. That is a shift that I’m profoundly grateful for, whatever else has happened.

Doing and not doing

Second, I had a realisation that productivity when you’re self-organising is much more a matter of thinking "I will" rather than "I must", "I should", or "I want to". This last year, I’ve spent too much of my time thinking and planning in the manner of "Oh, I should do that", or "I’d love to do that", but a pattern I notice in people I follow and admire is a different intent, one in which you "do or do not, there is no try".

If I had a new year’s resolution, it would be to simplify things somewhat. I’m bouncing around a lot between contexts and tasks and projects and thoughts and content to read and watch and play. All of that can often leave me feeling somewhat bewildered, tired, and like I’m running in circles. Some of it is necessary, of course, but a lot of it isn’t.

I wish I was more able to retain just one project/book/game at a time, for instance – my brain has always jumped around a lot but I’m at a time of life, and humans are at a point of societal evolution, where this is easier than ever, and it’s no excuse to let a naturally busy brain be exploited by an unnaturally busy culture.

Negotiating hope

At 11.59pm last night, I ritually and ceremoniously finished off a bottle of whisky. Not just any bottle of whisky, this was a leaving present from OCSI, and so it had been on the go for the last year at least – I’ve been sipping from it when I hit certain work-related milestones, such as first client, first payment, first tax return, etc.

With the 2021-22 tax year out of the way (barring some minor admin tasks), I wanted to stop looking backwards. I have an excitedly progressive feel about 2023, but I realise that in order to really jump on my own bandwagon, so to speak, I need to bring my full self and my whole energy to it. I need to use those meetings with myself to fire myself up, check myself over, and really make sure that what I want and what I’m doing are, if not totally defined, then at least in alignment.

I’m also "secretly" positive about 2023 in general. I know it’s not particularly easy or fashionable to feel positive about the world, hence the "secret". But at the same time, I’m a great believer in Hope, and believe that without it, we sink rapidly into bitter depression and uselessness – something I’ve been repeatedly close to as I’ve watched the news in 2022.

So I think there must be an inherent mental resilience that hangs on to that – "Hardcore Hope Negotiation" as I put it – even if others tell you that things are so, so awful right now. We need a productive form of optimism right now, both spiritually and societally. And we need tools and practices to encourage and capture that, which channel imagination and creativity into the world.

For every tablet and smart speaker expecting us to buy something, we need a blog post that kicks back and publishes something fresh. We need games that deliver new ideas, and music tracks that break economic models. We need to think outwardly more than inwardly. To have confidence that we can produce something around the nugget or an idea, a feeling, a thread of humanity.

Change is coming, whether we like it or now – governments will be forced to work out their (within and between state) details one way or another, and they will do it among a background of increasing difficult weather patterns that get harder to ignore. The future is already here. And it’s better to get ourselves prepared, and to be on its side.

Alright, here we go.

I have a vague desire to transform, maybe pivot this blogspace a bit. What started out as a place to publish and reflect on the week feels like it needs to evolve in line with my own circumstances. That link between the structure of a space (a digital space, in this instance) and the needs of the inhabitant (myself as writer, more than you, as reader) feels more acute than ever.

To say this is to reframe the practice of weeknoting itself. It is to speculate and accept that the form and cadence of weekly reflections feeds the need of some sort of routine cycle to begin with. It slots neatly into a pattern that – rightly – embraces incremental change and regulated planning. It is a good tool to fit in with regular sprints and fast-paced calendars, for instance.

(Which isn’t to say it isn’t useful in other contexts – just that there is a synchronicity of rhythms there, which may or may not be naturally true in other patterns such as longer reflection cycles, or less repeated and regular approaches.)

However, the repeated comparison to architecture above is not accidental. Today I found myself re-reading a Monade post on 7 things to unlearn, from Paulo Mendes da Rocha, a Brazilian architect working in a mainly-brutalist approach.

Rule #1 is particularly related to weeknoting: "Art is no longer to be made mysterious". We have reached a state of knowledge working and the attention economy where there is more value in showing how you work, than in keeping secrets. Sadly though, technology is still becoming more complex and more opaque, a trend which seems to be increasing with each extra tool and acronym that gets released.

This, and the other 6 rules, all strike me straight in the heart and chime with my own relationship not with structural engineering, but with software and hardware engineering.

It is hard for me to read sci-fi (extending to solarpunk) these days, for instance, and rule #2 digs at this somewhat: "It’s impossible to imagine formations and formal transformations if you don’t know how to do them." – that is, imagination is tied to a pragmatic concept of being able to build something. As an engineer, I’m aware that ideas are cheap, and implementation is where the magic lies. Time has run out for wishful thinking.

Rules #5 and #6 deal with destruction and beginnings, and the revolutionary need to believe in yourself as a creator rolls forwards into rule #7. This is Mendes da Rocha’s relationship with dreaming, and with the forces that drive us to face truths, to invent, and to re-invent.

"Those who don’t know don’t even ask; don’t even know what to ask. So, what we are talking about here is the possibility of trying to show something whilst working within that confused and erratic context."

That quote sums up where this blog is at currently – my contexts (both individual and global) have perhaps never been more confused and erratic.

Finding some hope in the chaos is often like looking for a shell buried among a beach of stones. But it’s still in there, and there is still the possibility of finding it.

I’m not writing enough, I’m putting it into a place of magic where words have meaning and meaning has power and then I get worried I won’t have enough time to make the powerful words mean what I want them to mean. Publishing is both an exercise in inspiration, but also an exorcism of the self. I should try to change that.

A lot of where I was several years ago has fallen by the wayside, like the leaves turning yellow outside and drifting slowly and naturally to the ground. Change happens, and I’ve had a lot of change this year.

A lot of it has been out of my control and so I tend not to write about it – global things as they are, and right now I struggle to keep up with British politics on a daily basis, let alone get any coherent thoughts about it together.

Meanwhile, I feel like I haven’t stopped since July, on a personal basis. In June I realised it had been a year since I’d moved to the new chapter, and that it was time to take freelancing a little more seriously than I had been, whatever that might mean. I’m very grateful to a handful of people who are in a similar space to me, and who all seem to float about in a Venn-style similar network. I’m now working across a few organisations, but it often also feels like a "small world". Maybe I should mention names, or maybe not. Anyway, if you’re reading this and think I’m referring to you, then thanks 🙂

Which is all to say that I’m busy, learning a lot about lots of different things, and not getting much time for writing or personal projects at the moment. Nor am I on social media a lot, but to be honest, I think that’s maybe a good thing. Endless scrolling of monkey-mind context-switching is quite a tiring thing.

I’ll try to write up more thoughts on an ad-hoc basis as I go though, to reduce the weekly pressure of writing something good. Fragmented thoughts may not read as well, but they’re probably more of an accurate statement of life these days than any other structure.

What can I remember of the last few weeks though?

• I’ve been doing some restructuring of what others might think of as "admin", but that I’ve come to think of as "modern information infrastructure" – ie the approach I take to emails and news feeds. I spent a solid few hours cleaning through my inbox, but also setting up a bunch of Thunderbird filters to help automatically clear out any old emails more than a few weeks old – that includes all the regular notices and alerts I get from schools, WordPress security updates, etc. I don’t need to be sorting that out manually.

• Similarly, I’ve been revising my RSS feed categories. Initially I set up a link between an IMAP folder for newsletters as an RSS feed, and then brought the RSS feed back into Thunderbird to "close the loop". It’s nice having Thunderbird as a single "info dashboard" but I’m getting a bit of conflict between reading feeds there vs in TinyTinyRSS. I should probably choose one or the other. I’ve also just re-sorted feeds from "Must read" and "Could read" into a kind of social permaculture-zone approach I’m working on, from "closeknit" to "sociable" to "widerworld". The aim there is to give more weight to more personable updates (eg from friends), and try to keep "further away" updates at a bit more of a distance.

• In more restructuring, I’m aiming to use Mondays as a house-catchup day to get personal life admin done, and Fridays as more of a flexible professional/personal project type day. It worked the first week, but I needed to work Monday the second week, and the third week – next week – is half term so it’s not going great so far, to be fair. Maybe November will balance the average out better…

• Grappling with Google calendar and Thunderbird struggling to accept invites for non-Google accounts through the Google calendar service, possibly involving "Visitor Sessions" for documents. Basically, I want to add my groundlake.org email address to my Google account, but Google thinks it’s already in use for an account which Google has set up but won’t tell me where. Hnnnnng.

There’s probably more, but I want to practice writing shorter updates, so maybe this is just an exercise in that.

Links

• How to choose the right static site generator – some handy thought processes here. Also reading Calm Technology that I re-discovered (readiscovered?) in my Kindle. MINIMAL VIABLE TECH.

• Game Design Mimetics (Or, What Happened To Game Design?) – kyle kukshtel’s game dev/design blog – thinking a fair bit about interaction and narrative at the mo although not doing much with it. Side project dreams.

• Diablo: Immortal and Aesthetic Gacha-ism – linked to from the above, on gamifying games, extending entertainment hooks out and out into the wider world.

• Oh hey there is a new (and final?) Umberto Eco book out?

NUMERO ZERO: The Last Of Umberto Eco

• Why the Tories don’t care about the future (FT £)

• Inheritance and the prototype chain – JavaScript | MDN

• Wasting Time in Tech Interviews

• ‘Eventually it will just be a barcode, won’t it?’ Why Britain’s new stamps are causing outrage and upset

• Data Governance Overview

• Amber Case – Calm Technology and Human-Machine Interactions

• Vanishing HeritageNeocha – Culture & Creativity in Asia

• NIST’s Post-Quantum Cryptography Standards – Schneier on Security

• JSON Creator Douglas Crockford Interview by Evrone

• Wildlife under stress as dry spell shrinks rivers

• The Hacking of Starlink Terminals Has Begun

• The Contradictory Bind

• The librarian who defied the Taliban

• Friday Squid Blogging: The Language of the Jumbo Flying Squid

• What China’s worst drought on record looks like

• Review of Apple Watch health and fitness tracking for Tai Chi

• The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse

• Is WordPress Killing the Planet?

• The Collectors Who Save Video-Game History from Oblivion

• Bully in the Alley

• A few lessons learned from tracking The Queue – Postbureaucrat

• The Wisdom in Ignorance

• Holy Sites of Heptonstall

• Some thoughts on AI art tools

Today (Thursday) I’m at a natural pause point, which seems like a good time to jot down a quick update. The gods have smiled on me before, and this is the second time where work has slowed, and a new opportunity has circled in to fill the gap. Previously it was some emergency database work for a day. This time it’s to collaborate on a project proposal. Maybe it’s synchronicity and the magic of being, or maybe I just don’t notice it when it’s less coincidental.

Either way, I feel I’m getting used to managing multiple clients, projects, timescales and threads. I’m "reconfiguring" my own expectations for myself, in terms of the work I need to actually do as a freelancer. Now that I’ve got the hang of regular invoicing and some new tech, my confidence has moved on to other areas.

Visiting a new country is a strange experience, but an addictive one if you can stick the landing. I remember stepping off the plane in Cairo and into a taxi; the night air was several dozen degrees higher than the cool of the airport. The stars were out but the city felt bristling, like a nightclub. The taxi drove past strange buildings, but I was more aware of the dramatic shift in the culture of the road. Tired from travelling, and yet awake and alert as if my life depended on it.

I wonder if there’s a correlation between people who like the thrill of travel and who enjoy being freelance. There is, for me at least, a passing resemblance – the sense that it is on you to merely survive, that you will need to pay attention and use all of your skills, that anything could happen at any time. I’ve got used to expecting interesting and exciting emails these days, in contrast to so much office work.

And, ultimately, a sense that you’ll never quite know where you’ll end up. But that so long as you have some level of agency, and that you’re item to fresh ideas, people, and even emotions, the journey will have been worth it.

What I’ve been up to of late:

• Acting as target user and working through user flows on the Laravel project that’s – possibly – nearing an end. I’ll wait and see if it has any legs, but originally it was intended to help me learn Laravel properly, which has definitely worked out. I’ve had a lot of space to just get on with code, and have found Laravel (and Docker, Tailwind, etc) to be neat (in the structural sense) to work with, on the whole. I’ve had to practice my project manager skills a bit more than I thought, but it’s helpful to "calibrate" my skills here, out in the real world.

• More excited than I should be to be asked to go in on a project, as a sustainable tech consultant. I’m finding I can put together proposals for sustainability and environmental approaches pretty quickly and easily at the moment – writing up what you would do, given half the chance, is actually a really good test of one’s skills of planning, contingency and communication. Everyone should practice this, as a form of "work fiction". In fact, I’d love to see more "what if" plans from potential recruits, as well as wha they’ve actually worked on. GitHub your life plans.

• Recovering from the last few weeks, which have ricocheted between end of school term and all the emotions involved in #son1 leaving primary school, driving off to France for heat and Typhoons (the jetplane), and taking an overnight trip to London (which the photos on this post are all from). Really, REALLY glad it’s currently under 30 degrees.

• Completing my first Fortnite battle pass, not long after my two kids, so pretty proud about keeping up with the youth…

I have way too much "idea energy" floating around at the moment though. 💡 ⚡ There are a dozen little projects I’d love to do, from cleaning up old consoles and controllers, to coding an interactive story in Inkle, and from starting a tech-repair network to doing up the summer house. Like visiting a new city, I need to adjust that energy to expectations – it’s not feasible to visit everything in a short trip, but you can adopt a blended approach of prioritising the must-sees, alongside embracing the chaos. In this case, though, the chaos is of my own ADHD-like attention span, rather than the rapid ebb and flow of a population centre. I am visiting my own sense of being, and enjoying it.

Some recent professional tweaks:

• Finally took a new photo to replace my old company one. The new one is a bit more informal and includes grey hair and my own house as a background. It feels oddly … authentic? You can see it in action at my LinkedIn page. I’m not planning on updating my Twitter pic though.

• I’ve ended up starting my own Slack space to be able to connect with a client in a shared channel. I’ve also set up a new Slack space from scratch for the tech network mentioned above, which I’ve not really done before. However I’m not really using it to chat informally – I have a Discord which is more for that "background chatter", which you’re more than welcome to visit here if you’ve read this far 🙂

Time to dash, but just realised it’s been 4 months since I last posted. See you again next season…