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When I moved to Singapore and got super busy building out Neo, the blog really started to become neglected.

It had always been a bit of a strange beast, meandering over 12 years and a hodge-podge mashup of travelogue, personal observations (more suitable to a journal), re-shared material, and things both professional and peripherally relevant or focused on work I was doing.

Lack of focus on something relevant and useful for readers (despite a handful of very popular posts) made me realize it was more for me than a reading audience, and made me feel it was time for a relaunch around the public service I had always intended the blog to be. And a higher commitment to quality over cruft.

Across Weirdish Wild Space, has been around for over twelve years now and is badly in need of a re-focus and some re-organizing.

So, the blog is on a short hiatus while I take some time to sift through old material, remove stuff that is better put in my journal, redesign a bit, and extract the useful audience-facing technical material that still belongs here.

Stand by. Be back soon-ish.

I just recently moved the blog over to jekyll as the Jekyll team got into releasing beta versions of its 3.0 release.

Despite it’s popularity in the Rails community for a while now (enough so it raised eyebrows at me having a roll-my-own blog system), up until 3.0 I had issues with Jekyll , but the new version seems to eliminate most of my larger bugbears.

Strangely, the big catalyst behind the move was themes (and an interesting point of how policy can drive behaviour), as Google announcing it was going to start punishing sites that were not mobile responsive in its search results had organic traffic (and my search rankings) drop by half the week google pulled the trigger on it. Redesigning my theme from scratch to be mobile responsive seemed a lot more work than modifying someone else’s theme. But, while that probably clinched it, there were other good reasons too:

Since I’ve moved back to using vim+tmux in the terminal for virtually all my writing and code editing (and gotten faster in a number of respects), one of the key things I’ve missed from Sublime Text 3 has been its excellent and speedy markdown preview in Chrome.

It was a friction point in moving back to terminal vim since an old plugin I’d used before was no longer available, and the fallback I’d had to render Github-flavoured markdown was to use a combination of Tim Pope’s Dispatch and the octodown gem . It had a number of issues, one of which was the time it took to shell out and then render the preview, but more than that, it just seemed to slow everything down.

A few weeks ago, two of our officemates (this guy and this guy ) did a Level Up Lunch on visual notetaking and the Bullet Journal technique.

I like to think I am someone who seriously get things done, but I have to admit I was struck by the simplicity and clarity of the system and the possibility that even while I am great at getting things done with Taskpaper , I do recognize that I still pile things into and roll things forward into future weeks arbitrarily, often just removing the problem I had with days getting overloaded with other systems, to future weeks with Taskpaper. I really liked the idea of the Monthly versus Daily calendaring, as well as the Event logging that seemed inherent in bullet journaling. And, well… it’s always good to shake things up, so I decided to take the plunge. I’m on the cusp of the 45 day mark, so I felt I should share my findings so far.

And make glorious and interesting mistakes. Some great advice from the ever-wise Neil Gaiman.

Cool kinetic typography from Nanna Påskesen

via the Farnam Street Weekly newsletter

Strangely, one of the earliest things I learned in unix computing was crontab -e. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to say, the reason I learned to use vim in the first place, was so I could fire off automated jobs in cron while I slept (Don’t ask. Mine was a complex childhood. :-) ).

I’ve never been a fan of Apple’s launchd replacement on the OSX operating system.

Perhaps I was just expecting a lot, lot more from a book that purports to teach Hackers Design and subtitled Reverse Engineering Beauty but, at best, I’d only be able to give DfH an “ok” rating.

While I was hoping for something that would both illuminate and then directly show how to apply Design learnings from a hacking perspective or even the many, many rues of thumb and underpinnings that define Design, I found the book more a theoretical tour through the underpinnings which often meandered and went off course (I still don’t know why SEO was discussed at length) and was a bit disappointing. A number of any elementary books on visual and information Design could have taken its place and the “for Hackers” in its title seemed marketing hype rather than applicable reality. It did, however, have an excellent section on Typography which I found personally very useful.

I have to admit I was a bit sceptical going into this book. It seemed to promise a lot with a simple premise and one, frankly, that made solutions to a lot of my product problems way simpler.

So, I was reading with a bit of scepticism and pleasantly surprised.

And yet still, despite the fact I think it does sort of approach storymapping from a very ideal direction, and doesn’t get into the weeds of what happens on complex projects or how to untangle a bigger and more problematic project, it does make a clear and compelling case for storymapping helping with the What of needs to be delivered often where quite often the problem is developers using Agile techniques and getting lost in the trees and quagmired in the How of implementing something.

I have to admit I really, really wanted to like this book.

While at least one of our company offices has invested a lot in getting across Clojure as being the next big thing for some of the technical projects we could be running and it does seem interesting enough on its surface (particularly with interesting datastore developments like Datamic) and purports to solve some interesting problems that are difficult to do so in other languages, I have to admit the primary draw of the book for me was the fact the writer had a style similar to that of Why the lucky stuff whose book on Ruby sucked me back into programming and enjoying building digital products again.