Monthly review: November 2015

Posted: - Modified: | monthly, review

Lots of coding this month, and lots of tech-related blog posts. =)

Consulting-wise, I’ve been learning a lot about NodeJS and Angular. I’ve been refining the internal command-line scraping tools and dealing with new requirements. I’ve also been working on a mobile prototype that uses ng-touch and a few other niceties. I’ve been making good use of the Q library for promises, too. Good thing I spent some time last month learning more about asynchronous programming.

The Emacs News series I’ve been publishing every Monday was well-received, and I’m gradually creating little tools to make it easier to summarize the news from various sources. I’ve also been using it to queue up some tweets for @emacs, so there’s regular activity over there. We had a fun Emacs Hangout, and I’ve scheduled another one for next month.

I’m glad I came across the poster for the Toronto Public Library hackathon. It was a good opportunity to learn about neat things you can do with the library’s web interface and data. They’ve posted a recap, and I’ve also braindumped a bunch of notes on the hack I made for visualizing search results by branch. Boggle of boggles, my userscript still works. =D

I’ve been thinking about how I want to use my time during this phase of the experiment, since I have more energy these days. Spending more time consulting means building up useful skills and prototyping cool stuff that my clients find helpful, so that’s good. It’s also good to take some time to explore other interests and skills, and to prepare for what’s likely to come up. Playing it by ear seems to be the way to go. I keep a long list of little ideas to work on for consulting, and I’ve been cleaning up my Org Mode agenda files to make it easier to see the personal stuff I want to work on. Since the weather is nice today, I’ll go for a walk to the library. Maybe I’ll do some sewing this afternoon.

Also, I filed my business taxes. The dry-run I did last month paid off. All I had to do was update the numbers and double-check my calculations. Yay! I might actually be getting the hang of this. I’ve taken more notes, so next year should be even easier.

I’m back to dual-booting Linux, hooray! I’m still figuring out parts of my new workflow. I think I’ll get it all sorted out over the next few weeks. I’ll probably still boot into Windows for things like Quickbooks and TurboTax (unless I feel like manually crunching the numbers for business taxes – wouldn’t that be something!), but everything else seems to be just fine.

Still feeling pretty much in hermit-mode, although I did make it out to a few low-key things. Next month is probably going to be complicated, but we’ll see.

In December, I’m looking forward to catching up on the cool things that have been going on in the Linux world since the last time I checked. I’d like to document and automate more of my processes, too, in preparation for possible fuzziness. Onward!

Category Last month % This month Avg h per week Delta (h/wk)
Business – Build 3.2 5.5 9 3.9
Discretionary – Play 6.9 8.9 15 3.4
Unpaid work 6.3 7.9 13 2.7
Discretionary – Social 0 0.6 1 1.0
Discretionary – Family 2.6 3.1 5 0.8
Sleep 37.4 37.9 64 0.8
Business – Connect 1.1 1.5 3 0.7
Business – Earn 11.2 10.7 18 -0.8
Discretionary – Productive 11.2 7.5 13 -6.2
Personal 20.0 16.2 27 -6.4

Blog posts

Sketches

Time

Category Last month % This month Avg h per week Delta (h/wk)
Business – Build 3.2 5.5 9 3.9
Discretionary – Play 6.9 8.9 15 3.4
Unpaid work 6.3 7.9 13 2.7
Discretionary – Social 0 0.6 1 1.0
Discretionary – Family 2.6 3.1 5 0.8
Sleep 37.4 37.9 64 0.8
Business – Connect 1.1 1.5 3 0.7
Business – Earn 11.2 10.7 18 -0.8
Discretionary – Productive 11.2 7.5 13 -6.2
Personal 20.0 16.2 27 -6.4

Huh. More drawing, more Borderlands, more cooking, actually a little less consulting, and less time on personal projects and routines. More time on coding, though. Didn’t expect that. Two and a half days is still more consulting than the one-day-a-week pace I’d been keeping before this recent intensification, anyway. Anyway, time still feels pretty good, so I’ll carry on.

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