Week Notes 13

— 3 minute read

I had a week off from week notes—and my laptop in general last week because I wanted a proper break over the long weekend, and oh boy did I need it. I’ve felt like a new penny all week!

Just as I mentioned in the last edition, I was starting to feel familiar symptoms of burnout, so that break has given my batteries a boost to get me through to the end of this massive project that I’m on, which finishes in about a month.

I’ve also been using a pomodoro timer and writing physical todo lists in my notebook which has been very useful in keeping my momentum going. I might write something proper about this strategy, soon.

I’ve also decided to block my availability out until the end of August with only a short website project (I am very excited about this one) and some long-term design system / retainer work. The rest of the time, I’ll be working on side-projects and redesigning this site. I’ll also just enjoy the summer and take it slow for a while.

Something that’s kept my spirits up is running my CSS newsletter, Piccalilli. Spending a bit of time each day either looking for cool stuff, or curating the links that get featured is really good for the soul. Writing a little article each week is also great, although I don’t know how long I can sustain that for. In the future, I might start featuring other people’s articles instead.

I started two new things this week. The first was my Patreon. I want to do more for the community and help people learn CSS and modern JavaScript, such as Web Components. I do need to feed my family though, so the aim is to build Patreon up to the point where it sustains a third or more of my time. My output levels would be much higher if that was the case.

The second thing I started was another newsletter. I chucked webcomponents.news up as a bit of an impulse, because I’ve already got the infrastructure with Curated and an healthy unhealthy domain name addiction. It feels good to shine the spotlight on Web Components because all we talk about is goddamn React or Vue. I think Web Components are one of the most exciting native web technologies going, too, so I'm looking forward to seeing how the newsletter pans out.

It’ll be interesting to see how the newsletters and Patreon shape up. The ideal situation is a couple of companies sign up to the position: sticky; Patreon tier to make everything super sustainable.

And with all that, I strike off my last todo of the day: “Write week notes”.

Digest

Hi 👋, I’m Andy — an educator and web designer

I produce front-end development tutorials over at Front-End Challenges Club and Piccalilli. You can sign up for updates on Piccalilli to stay up to date with its progress.

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