In Defence of Almost NaNoWriMo
Not 1/6th of the way in to Almost NaNoWriMo, and I’ll admit to feeling a little defensive. I was originally thinking of this article this morning in terms of being a spot-check or reflection on the exercise so far, but if I’m being brutally honest, it was a couple of comments that have been on a slow burn in the back of my mind since last night:
Special Feed for Dev.to
Back in January 2017 I started following what looked like a small and promising community of programmers (and those in adjacent fields) over at Dev.to. At the time I had the site’s whole feed pumping into my Feedly list, I’d commented on a few posts, and I was starting to think about either revitalizing this blog or picking some other platform for posting.
Sabbaticals, Reflections, and Changes
I’ve had a few versions of this post floating around for longer than I care to think about. What follows is something closer to what I’d started around the same time I was working on the “13 Years in the Valley” retrospectives. For some reason I thought I’d more directly stated just how bad the burnout was, but after looking back I apparently only had the conversation as fully and expressedly in my head.
So let’s start the reflection part of this endevour.
Projects Projects Projects
In yesterday’s post I mentioned my goals for the coming month, and one was going through the various projects and giving a bit of a status report on them. Today’s going to be a bit of a high-level overview, and the next few posts will dig a little deeper into each project.
Almost NaNoWriMo
It seems a little ridiculous to tag this “NaNoWriMo”, but I’m not really sure what to call it. I’ve had a few posts in draft for longer than I care to mention, and while the desire has been there the energy has been lacking… most likely to be the subject of some upcoming posts.
For those who don’t know, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month. The idea being that you just start writing at the start of November, and work at a steady pace to have a completed work by the end of the month. Just writing, edit later. It’s a really nice idea for helping those of us who just need a little push to get started.
Retrospective: 13 Years in the Valley, Part 2
A lot of life has been happening, and it seems maybe I need a little perspective - and so this “retrospective”.
Six days later and I still haven’t quite gotten into the habit of regular blogging yet, so whatever is done by the time my lunch break is over is what’s getting posted. Like before, some of that time was taken getting some essentials:
Retrospective: 13 Years in the Valley, Part 1
A lot of life has been happening, and it seems maybe I need a little perspective - and so this “retrospective”.
Why Part 1?
Well, I haven’t quite gotten into the habit of regular blogging yet, so whatever is done by the time my lunch break is over is what’s getting posted. I’d say lunch hour, but some of that time was taken getting some essentials:
A Pretzel, A Jekyll, Some Pages, and a Cranky Git
Don’t mind the dust, and sorry about the cobwebs… To say it’s been a while would be something of an understatement since the last post is from 2013.
At the time I was earnestly looking to ramp up and do something with the Blogger account I opened and never actually used for anything other than oAuth. Life hit hard - a combination of events, accumulated effects of a sleep disorder, depression, and the early stages of burnout - and so it sat a little longer.
ASP-Ajaxed 2.1.1: Finding my feet
Woot! ASP Ajaxed 2.1.1 is up. 
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I took over the ASP Ajaxed project in the hopes of keeping it alive. I’m still orienting myself to how Google Code hosts projects, and I’m still trying to figure out just how I’m going to go about running this particular project.
Keeping a good thing going
I do a lot of Classic ASP/VBScript programming - It’s what my bread-winning project is built in, it’s what my side projects are built in, it’s what Snitz Forums (a FLOSS project I help with) is written in.
One of the things that has made my life a little easier is a neat little ASP/VBScript framework over at https://code.google.com/p/asp-ajaxed/. I’ve integrated it into the LMS I built for work, and a few other work-related projects. I love it.
