Weeknotes 23:35

October 24, 2023

Week of October 15–21

There is not a lot to talk about from this past week. (I had more to say than I originally thought.)

Work continues to be slow as several projects wrapped up and new projects are just in the beginning phases and will not hit development until near the end of next month.

I have struggled to take advantage of this downtime. There is not anything particular that I have just been itching to learn. I have several different self-paced courses that I have taken over the past three or four years, but few of them excited me to where I wanted to try to pick them back up.

I did spend a little bit of time trying to get back into Wes Bos’ course, Beginner Javascript. I had made some good progress in 2020 during a lull but then never got back to it after the workload increased. I know there are a lot of little things that I could pick up from this course. But I have struggled to stay energetic watching the videos.

I look forward to project work again. I enjoy bringing sites to life with HTML, CSS, and Javascript. As I have mentioned many times, CSS is my favorite of the three and I enjoy solving layout challenges with the variety of tools now available. Not having a lot to do right now is draining differently and has not been helpful as I have tried to muster up the will to sharpen my skills.

I had entertained the idea of signing up for Frontend Mentor so that I could build out their challenges. It would be a chance to keep the tools sharpened until it was time to engage in project work again. I’m just not convinced that that would be the wisest use of my financial resources right now and in the long term.

I need to find a creative challenge that will keep me engaged and scratch my itch.

Social media?

Back in August, I shared my grief over the loss of what Twitter once was. I still visit X because I want to feel connected to others in the Web community or Christian community or keep up with my sports teams. I still keep coming back though I feel that it is a dying platform. But still, there are a lot of people and groups that are posting there so it is hard to abandon entirely.

I have also debated on whether or not I want to invest in a new platform. I did get an invite to Bluesky but never signed up. I have flirted with the idea of joining Mastodon but was not able to join the server that I wanted to (frontend.social) and was sure I would be disappointed in how it was like Twitter (in better days) but not quite.

I finally did sign up for a Mastodon account a couple of weeks ago. I still have yet to post to my account. I found several in the Web community that I enjoyed connecting with on Twitter in the past but there are still many who are not there or still only on X.

I enjoyed reading Ana Rodrigues’ post, Could it be that maybe LinkedIn was the answer after all? If so, I lost the game, which I linked to from my feed in Mastodon. I have found my main source of connection through LinkedIn these days but it still is not the same.

I still don’t have any answers or know what I am going to do about social media. I just know that I miss the connections I once had and have not quite found an experience that replicates it yet. I am guessing it may never exist.

I am glad that I finally connecting to a community at the church we started attending over a year ago. It has been an answer to prayer. Now I just need to be more intentional in reconnecting with friends that require a phone call or video chat.

Articles I read

The Athletic

Books I am reading

What I watched

What I played

MLB The Show 23 (Rays) – I went 1-3 this week, breaking a 4-game losing streak with a win in the last game I played on Saturday.

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