Content Consumption

2017-02-14

I remember content consumption being quite a simple process before I owned a smartphone. I had some preferred RSS feeds that I subscribed to with a reader of my choice, which I would go through on my laptop whenever I had time and save articles that I was interested in reading later. In the years since I first started using smartphones I’ve gone through a few different mobile-first apps such as Flipboard and Pocket, trying to augment/improve my content consumption workflow, but as of last week it seems I’ve come back around largely to my pre-smartphone habits.

Length

2017-02-13

Since the start of the year I’ve been trying to make a concerted effort to write more. I realise that many of my biggest hurdles at the moment can be traced a lack of regularity and discipline, but there has been one thing in particular which has caught my attention recently when I’ve been going over topics I’d like to write about: length. I seem to convince myself that if I cannot (or don’t think I can) write about a certain topic up to a certain arbitrary length, it is not worth even trying to put together a post on that topic.

Portability

2017-01-29

The past month has seen me think a lot about portability in development teams and across environments. The first real development project I worked on last year made use of a utility script which provided a unified development environment interface for all of the developers, a go script. This was something of a revelation, as it really helped with my onboarding and environment setup, and allowed me to be a productive contributor right away.

Facing Disappointment

2017-01-14

I went through a period last year where I was listening to a lot of podcasts on the Nerdist network. The stand-up comedians who often feature on various Nerdist podcasts will every so often talk about career progression and recognition in the world of stand-up. A point that has been brought up in those podcasts which continues to resonate with me is to ‘just kill’ (write good material, perform it well, listen to the crowd’s feedback, make adjustments and get a better reaction next time).