Week Notes 03/03/23

2023-03-03

In my first week note, I pondered whether I might do another one. Well, flipping heck, here I am.

It has been a week of learning, in what I hope will be a year of learning.

Most of my digital career has been spent doing an idiosyncratic mixture of digital leadership and web development. I started back in 1998 making a website for a ethical cess-pit of a parcel delivery company (of which I could tell many dark tales) but amidst the greed and depravity I fell in love with the fundamental mechanisms of the web: HTML and CSS. Even then, it was clear that there could be sufficient complexity in website development to build a life's work around.

Back then I was doing pretty much everything single-handedly: development, design, website management. Over the years, I got increasingly pulled away from making things for the web and towards management. What development I got to do was mostly "back-end" development but I did less at the "front-end". So recently I have been re-immersing myself in, and falling back in love with, all aspects of web development. You never stop learning.

In that spirit, this week, I have:

Been a good boy and completed my exercises for the week on Ferdinandi's Vanilla JS Structure and Scale course - I did Vanilla JS Essentials last year. I can recommend the courses. Having to do three practical exercises a week helps to reinforce the learning.
Practised some of my recent learning refining the performance of our company website, stripping out the last remaining framework (Bootstrap) and using vanilla CSS instead. Some good results already.
Spent some time thinking about web typography and fonts. Guided by my good friend Charles Roper I've been exploring the lovely fonts at https://beautifulwebtype.com/. For now, I've decided to use IA Writer Quattro. I'm also taking the email course at https://betterwebtype.com by Matej Latin. Feels good to be moving out of my developer comfort zone, though I have so much more to learn.

On the communications side of things, I've also started reading Everything I Know About Life I Learned from Powerpoint by Russell Davies. So far, I'm enjoying the defiant way in which Davies defends and praises Powerpoint. It's easy to get into a certain pattern of thinking (e.g. 'all the best software is created by small independent producers, corporate software sucks') but like all patterns of thinking, that misses a lot. I'm now thinking: oh, Powerpoint was pretty cool..

I'd emphasise: all this learning and discovery is a joyous break from my usual full-on get-stuff-done work ethic. I deeply appreciate the space to explore, and I want to find ways of balancing exploring and doing.

So Week Notes: will I be writing again next week? I love the words of Count Alfred Korzybski: "I don't know. Let's see."

(Korzysbki was sole proponent of an obscure field called General Semantics. He also coined the phrase "The map is not the territory.")

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