Well, it was a while back that I said I would start writing again – that just never quite happened.
Much interesting has happened in these months, a few co-workers left the company, a few new faces came in; there was also a promotion and a number of new projects. Oh, and there’s a new relationship, and a fair bit of time now going to my old profession and now hobby of photography. Between all of these, spare time isn’t something I have much of – if any.
With all this in mind, many people would give up and walk away – but I see this as being important enough to fight for. It’s a matter of priorities and time management. For a developer, being active in the community is important; it’s easy to be left behind once you find yourself outside the loop. So, I’ll simply have to make community involvement a higher priority than it’s been. As for time management though, the story isn’t so simple.
I’ve been using Tasks (which I highly recommend) for a while now to keep track of what I’m working on, and for that it is quite effective. For time management though, I need to reevaluate how I work completely; find a method that allows me to be as productive as possible. I’ve seen a number of articles, guides, and books on the topic, so I believe I’ve a fair bit of reading in front of me. As I go through this process, I’ll write about my findings, and share any solutions I find.
If anybody has advice on how to make time for everything, I would certainly like to hear it. Hopefully, this time when I say this blog is coming back to life, it actually will.
Over the years I’ve used most of the major note taking tools around, I’ve been a paying customer of Evernote for over a decade, I’ve used Standard Notes, Good Notes, pen & paper, and a bunch of others I can’t recall now. They were never quite right for my needs — some were close, but none were what I was after. One of the major challenges was that I didn’t know what I needed, and it’s hard to find something when you don’t know what you’re looking for.
For the second year I am publishing a year-in-review – something I had generally avoided in the past, as the tone of these posts is typically just cynicism and negativity. Looking back at 2015, it wasn’t all positive (what year is?), but there was certainly some good, and there are great things to look forward to.
In a season filled with empty marketing pitches, worthless predictions, and pointless projections – it’s important to look at the good and avoid the cynicism overload that is all too common.
For those outside of the IT field, developers are looked at as miracle workers – through us, business leaders think anything is possible (and they often see no reason why we can’t work our latest miracle by the next morning). In reality though, we do work miracles; we save companies vast amounts of money every year through increased worker efficiency and automation, we enable new lines of business that wouldn’t be possible otherwise, and reduce energy costs because we keep the office lights turned off.
Wow! It’s been over a year since this blog o’ mine has seen any activity, though I’ve certainly not forgot about it. A lot has happened in the last year, so I’ll use this post as a bit of an update (and a warm-up for my return to blogging).
I’m not going to promise you’ll see a new post daily as was once the case, though I’ll try to ensure something new is up at least once a week.
I’m a developer, and I love what I do, it’s a great industry, and a very exciting field to be in. If you read my blog often, you’ll see I take every opportunity to mention how great this line of work can be, today I offer a somewhat different, less sugar-coated view.
The Pressure There is a constant pressure on developers to be better, to do more, to produce more, sometimes more than is possible.
