Trying it one more time - weeknotes #1
I've had a few failed attempts at weeknotes, but with an exciting new gig starting, which marks a significant milestone in my career, I figured I might try picking it up again.
How do you do weeknotes properly?
As far as I can tell, there's no magic formula to writing them, and it's natural for the format to change until you find something that works for you.
The thing that finally pushed me over the edge and into starting was Matt Webb's piece: A pre-history of weeknotes, plus why I write them and perhaps why you should too - I was reminded about how much I enjoyed reading them from others. I have enough spinning plates going to make it feel like I'll have something to write about each week, but I think to start with I'll try the trick of project codenames rather than the real names as in many cases the techniques or specifics I'll covering will hopefully be useful, interesting, or in the very least transferrable to other gigs reader might be engrossed in.
So what's been catching my attention this week? What's been on my mind?
Winding up my time on an existing, fun project where I've been building out a new open data product.
I'll be able to link to it once it's launched, but the last few months have been a pretty heads down for me, where I've been up to my eyeballs in Continuous delivery, feature flags, Elasticsearch, Django internals, Jupyter notebooks, date math, and building APIs.
It's helped me appreciate how nice a language like Python is to work with these days, and just how mature web frameworks are. I've had a proposal accepted at DjangoCon Europe in Copenhagen where I'll be talking about this, so closer to the date, I'll likely be writing about it in more detail.
in the meantime, it's worth knowing that if you work with Django, I think it's worth investing a bit of time getting familiar with Jupyterlab. It's a really nice way to be able to share bits of analysis, and build quick and dirty viz that you can share with teams. If you're interested, Simon Willison has a fantastic workshop on github that's worth looking into.
Starting a new open data project related to the environment and the internet
I'm not sure how I'll be able to speak about this project under a codename, without giving too much away, but Friday was my first day, doing the kick-off workshop on a 6 month project.
Among other things I'll be taking a dataset compiled over the last ten years, of which sites on the internet run on green power, and when they switched, and building open dataset from this, as well as trying to grow an OSS ecosystem around the rallying call of "make the web green".
Right now, IT as an industry is responsible for more carbon emissions than Canada, and for me at least, running your IT infrastructure on fossil fuels, feels a bit like running cars on leaded petrol must have felt like in the 20th century - an outmoded avoidable practice we didn't really think about, that has a clear human cost, that we need to phase out.
I feel privileged that I get to work on this, as it feels meaningful, intellectually challenging, and fun, but oh jeez, after the workshop, I am pretty daunted by much there is to do in the next 6 months, and so many things are whizzing around my head that we need to think about: governance and advisory boards, fund-raising, onboarding for OSS projects, technical architecture.
Oh, that and getting my German up to scratch, so I can effectively interact with the German state between now and August, as I'll need to be able to present what we have been creating, auf Deutsch.
Honestly, this last step feels the scariest part for me - I've tried and failed so many times to get confident using German, the various approaches I've tried have turned out miserably. I've heard some good things about Lingoda, though, and I think I'll try it in March.
Fighting off a cold
Of course, this would all be so much easier this week had I not been bed-bound, and generally feeling awful with some nasty, nasty cold. 7 days later, on a Sunday, I still feel like I'm trying to fight off. The only upside is me discovering just how effective 600mg Ibruprofen is for wiping out headaches.
So that's it. First week note out way. Phew.