Tags: reflection

I have a feeling that 2025 is going to be a year of reflection for me. It’s such a nice round number, 25. One quarter of a century.

That’s also how long myself and Jessica have been married. Our wedding anniversary was last week.

Top tip: if you get married in year ending with 00, you’ll always know how long ago it was. Just lop off the first 2000 years and there’s the number.

As well as being the year we got married (at a small ceremony in an army chapel in Arizona), 2000 was also the year we moved from Freiburg to Brighton. I never thought we’d still be here 25 years later.

2005 was twenty years ago. A lot of important events happened that year. I went to South by Southwest for the first time and met people who became lifelong friends (including some dear friends no longer with us).

I gave my first conference talk. We had the first ever web conference in the UK. And myself, Rich, and Andy founded Clearleft. You can expect plenty of reminiscence and reflection on the Clearleft blog over the course of this year.

2010 was fifteen years ago. That’s when Jessica and I moved into our current home. For the first time, we were paying off a mortgage instead of paying a landlord. But I can’t bring myself to consider us “homeowners” at that time. For me, we didn’t really become homeowners until we paid that mortgage off ten years later.

2015 was ten years ago. It was relatively uneventful in the best possible way.

2020 was five years ago. It was also yesterday. The Situation was surreal, scary and weird. But the people I love came through it intact, for which I’m very grateful.

Apart from all these anniversaries, I’m not anticipating any big milestones in 2025. I hope it will be an unremarkable year.

Winnie Lim » this website as a learning and reflection tool

I love reading about how—and why—people tinker with their personal sites. This resonates a lot.

This website is essentially a repository of my memories, lessons I’ve learnt, insights I’ve discovered, a changelog of my previous selves. Most people build a map of things they have learnt, I am building a map of how I have come to be, in case I may get lost again. Maybe someone else interested in a similar lonely path will feel less alone with my documented footprints. Maybe that someone else would be me in the future.

Oh, and Winnie, I can testify that having an “on this day” page is well worth it!

How I write conference talks. — Ethan Marcotte

I can relate to Ethan’s 16-step process for writing conference talks.

Step 14 is the most important.

Turning a MacBook into a Touchscreen with $1 of Hardware · cat /var/log/life

Well now, this is a clever bit of hardware hacking.

Surfaces viewed from an angle tend to look shiny, and you can tell if a finger is touching the surface by checking if it’s touching its own reflection.

Write it down

Such a great piece of advice from Mark:

Whenever someone asks me to do something that I think seems ill-conceived in some way, I ask them to write it down. That’s it. Because writing is high effort. Making sentences is the easy bit, it’s the thinking I want them to do. By considering their request it slows them down. Maybe 30% of the time or something, they come back and say ‘oh, that thing I asked you to do, I’ve had a think and it’s fine, we don’t need to do it’.

Like Mark, I think I enjoy being on the receiving end of this too:

These days, I welcome being asked to ‘write it down’. It gives me permission to take a breath. To pause and reflect on what I’m asking. I’m convinced my heart rate drops a little. You see, in some environments this would be called ‘process’, or ‘red tape’. ‘Being asked to write something down is a blocker to my flow’. Those kinds of responses miss the mark. When being asked to ‘write something down’ it’s really shorthand for ‘take some time and think about what you’re asking’.

Writing is thinking.

Reflections on Resilient Web Design - Scott Dawson

I’m genuinely touched that my little web book could inspire someone like this. I absolutely love reading about what people thought of the book, especially when they post on their own site like this.

This book has inspired me to approach web site building in a new way. By focusing on the core functionality and expanding it based on available features, I’ll ensure the most accessible site I can. Resilient web sites can give a core experience that’s meaningful, but progressively enhance that experience based on technical capabilities.

The Camera in the Mirror

Kubrickian pictures taken by the Google robot wherein it captures its own reflection.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | 'Darkest ever' material created

It's like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.