Learning Log, Jan 2020: routines and rhythm of business

Decided to revert from Weeknotes back to monthly Learning Logs for various and sundry reasons. I think I may re-title the Learning Logs to be numbered, because that was fun in Weeknotes. That’ll be a nice first test of using a Netlify redirects file.

The past couple weeks I haven’t made a terrible amount of progress on my side projects. Right now I’m trying to figure out my routines and how they align with my energy levels throughout the day and week.

Reading

Web design and development

• Systems, Mistakes, and the Sea
• The Burnout List: I'm in this post several times and I don't like it.
• Also eagerly enjoying Frank Chimero’s open redesign, with posts like Redesign: Nose-First, Looking at Letters, Picking Typefaces, and Scales & Hierarchy
• Interventions is a discussion on user agent interventions re: web APIs.

Privacy

• Spotify brings streaming ad insertion technology to podcasts
• The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It
• Ring Doorbell App Packed with Third-Party Trackers

Work and productivity

• “You’ll be surprised how much you will do in a day if you sit and do it.”
• Avoiding burnout as an ambitious developer

Other interesting articles

• What Happens to Your Body on No Sleep
• Remembering Nüshu, the 19th-Century Chinese Script Only Women Could Write
• This app matches marginalized communities to therapists who share their background
• Microsoft will be carbon negative by 2030

Project Goals for February

This is overly ambitious given that I also have travel coming up, but ya know, shoot for the moon:

• 📝 Write + publish 3 blog posts
• 💻 This site:
  • Re-implement Webmentions on top of Eleventy
  • Figure out what I want to get out of my site, what I want to communicate (i.e. deal with the identity crisis that is being a web platform PM that still wants to keep their design-dev background alive)
  • Figure out if I want to completely redesign my site or just revamp what I have, and start making progress on whichever path I choose
• ✂ Sewing: sew some drawstring bags for my reusable makeup pads (I'm trying to get back into sewing!)
• 🍳 Weaving: finally finish my egg weaving. All it needs are the final touches in order to hang it up. That’s all it has needed for months now.
• 📚 Studying: build more knowledge in web networking & storage.