Wave-ing Hello to 2022 🌊
A bit of personal news: I'm kicking off 2022 in a new mobile engineering role.
A bit of personal news: I'm kicking off 2022 in a new mobile engineering role.
It's been a while since I wrote an annual retrospective (publicly, anyway). It feels like a tradition worth revisiting — even if we are almost a week and a half into the new year.
Like many folks who keep a blog, I like to fiddle with setups and reorganize my “online presence” every so often. But I've come to realize that the problem with fiddling is that it's a distraction from doing. And if I want to do more (of whatever), then I've got to not only reduce the fiddling, but the friction as well.
Hugo is an excellent static site generator, and I've had a lot of fun building the Indigo theme that powers this site (as well as a few others!) — but it's time to retire it. If I want to write more (and I do!), being tied to a desktop and having to run incantations on the terminal to create a draft and publish the final article is… well, it's a pain. Yes, I can keep my drafts in Drafts or any other cross-platform writing app, but the fact remains that I still have to get to my Mac to publish. And if that Mac has to go in for servicing, then I need to find another machine, deploy all the fiddle bits that generate and publish the site, and hope that I remembered to commit any changes I'd made, either to the theme or the content.
It's a headache.
The way things are set up, I also need to switch contexts if I choose to publish a short, title-less “update” — for a few years now, long-form posts have been published to angelostavrow.com, and short posts have been published to Micro.blog, with some additional plumbing set up to get each feed into the other site, as well as everything pushed out to various communities that I like to engage in.
Fact is, nothing takes the fun out of creating a thing more than having to maintain it.
So, in the interest of offloading the work that I'd taken upon myself, let's discuss how things will be changing.
Since late November, I've been writing everything —that is, both long-form articles and short updates— on angelostavrow.blog, which is a Write.as-hosted blog. This will be the new home for my writing; the RSS feed is pushed to my Micro.blog account, where the cross-posting bot syndicates that content out to my Twitter and Mastodon accounts. I really like the focus Write.as puts on writing, but I like the communities with which I share my writing too, and this works really well to combine frictionless writing with frictionless sharing.
(Disclaimer: I've been working with their team building the official iOS app for WriteFreely, the open-source software that powers the Write.as service.)
I'm going to slowly import all posts on the old blog and Micro.blog to this new blog, and I'm going to try to make sure that old permalinks continue to work. Then, I'll be free to do a bit of re-working of my online presence:
So there you go. Happy New Year, friends, and if you'd like, consider updating your feed readers to the new blog's RSS feed.
Despite having fifty-two weekly retrospectives over four notebooks to look back on, I didn't write up any kind of “2019 In Review” post here. I did spend the morning of New Years Eve writing up an annual retrospective, though, as discussed in [episode 17 of Make Before Break]; I just didn't share any findings and insights.
It's been a week since [Frank] and I wrapped up and released the final episode for [Make Before Break]'s first season. Here are a few things we learned about making a podcast.
…and a voice for silent film.
I'm being a bit more careful about defining goals this year. Certainly, there are some things that I'm aiming to do, or that I need to do, but these things have to be balanced against the universe not especially giving a damn about my wants and needs — and I need to be okay with that. But more importantly, I'm working harder on timeboxing my projects in OmniFocus, for a few reasons.
Yesterday marked the end of my time working on [Manuscript], as the transition of the product over to its new owner is complete. With that, I'd been looking for a new contract, and today I'm happy to announce that I'll be joining the team at [Glitch]!