a scruffy ruffian
Good Omens – Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchet
The Diary Of A Young Girl – Anne Frank (Again!)
I’m not going to list everything I read in December, this is just an excuse to link to Matt’s blog so I get a pingback! Happy Birthday!
Last week Rich Tabor and I spent the week thinking about how to improve color and typography variation in Gutenberg. The result was this pull request.
I made a demo video to explain our intentions and how it works, but unfortunately the video was too big for GitHub, so I’m adding it here, and I’ll just link to this post.
This was a really fun little project, I hope we can find a way to land it!
I had an idea that it might be interesting to share what media I have been consuming each month. October was a lot more about creating than consuming, but I still found time for some music and books.
The Last Devil To Die – Richard Osman
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow – Gabrielle Zevin
Finished the last series of Ghosts.
Today I wrote my 3000th haiku. (I also did posts for 2000 and 1000). This means I have been doing this daily haiku thing for getting on for 10 years.
Sometimes I wonder if I should stop posting haiku. Why follow such a strict form? Why not focus on something more long form? Should I place more emphasis on quality rather than forcing something every day?
One of the lessons I have learnt by writing a haiku every day is that, even if it seems incredibly difficult to say anything, there are always words if you let them come. The important thing is to keep on creating, regardless of how you’re feeling and whether you even like the things you make. The act of creation is it’s own reward.
The discipline to post something every day has given me the confidence to keep creating even when it seems hard to go on. This has lead me recently to start posting a song I am practicing every day.
I think I’ll keep going with the haiku for now, while I still can.
Does your team have documented team values?
Someone asked me this question and my immediate thought was “blah that sounds boring”. After bouncing some ideas around with some friends, we came up with a way of making it more fun.
The idea was to use Dixit cards to help us. We played two different games:
Lay out 9 cards. Everyone decides in their head which card they think best represents the team and the team’s values. When everyone has decided we share together which cards we chose and why. I wrote down the reason for everyone’s choice.
Give everyone 9 cards each. Each person takes some time to secretly choose which card best represents the team and the team’s values. Once they have chosen they lay out their nine cards and everyone else tries to guess the card the person selected and the reason behind their choice. Again I wrote down the reasons for each choice.
This exercise gave us a list of about 20-30 values that we see within the team.
From this we combined and simplified the list into the following items
I hope this was a bit more of a fun activity than having to sit and think without the prompts.
I have been working on a straw bale studio for almost four years now! I thought it was time to share the work I have done and my updates in a more organised way so I created a new blog to collect everything together:
I am a big fan of woodcut (and linocut) printing – I think they look amazing. Something about the imperfections in the printing process really appeals to me. I particularly like the work of Lou Tonkin and Nick Hayes. The latter designed the Right To Roam website, which looks amazing.
I thought it would be interesting to try to create a WordPress theme that emulates that effect without having to go to the effort of creating wood/lino cuts! Of course it will never look as good as the real thing, but the effect is quite interesting I think:
This is a Block theme, which means it takes advanatage of a lot of the latest Gutenberg features – you will need to be using the latest Gutenberg plugin if you want it to look at its best (or wait for WordPress 6.1!).
This theme ships with an inverted style variation, so you can make it dark. I may add more style variations in the future if there is interest.
The theme is also designed to make it very easy to customize – for example it’s trivial to make the left column a different color, or to make the whole site a different color. If you’re interested in Block theme development I encourage you to have a look at the code.
Woodcut is available on the WordPress.org directory and on GitHub.
Yes, I know that’s not correct grammar. I made a video with my colleague Dave about what we’ve been up to at work recently.
New song about mountains. I had to buy a pump organ for this one. Also available on Spotify:
scruffian 