Journal tags: life

Speaking of serendipity, not long after I wrote about making a static archive of The Session for people to download and share, I came across a piece by Alex Chan about using static websites for tiny archives.

The use-case is slightly different—this is about personal archives, like paperwork, screenshots, and bookmarks. But we both came up with the same process:

I’m deliberately going low-scale, low-tech. There’s no web server, no build system, no dependencies, and no JavaScript frameworks.

And we share the same hope:

Because this system has no moving parts, and it’s just files on a disk, I hope it will last a long time.

You should read the whole thing, where Alex describes all the other approaches they took before settling on plain ol’ HTML files in a folder:

HTML is low maintenance, it’s flexible, and it’s not going anywhere. It’s the foundation of the entire web, and pretty much every modern computer has a web browser that can render HTML pages. These files will be usable for a very long time – probably decades, if not more.

I’m enjoying this approach, so I’m going to keep using it. What I particularly like is that the maintenance burden has been essentially zero – once I set up the initial site structure, I haven’t had to do anything to keep it working.

They also talk about digital preservation:

I’d love to see static websites get more use as a preservation tool.

I concur! And it’s particularly interesting for Alex to be making this observation in the context of working with the Flickr foundation. That’s where they’re experimenting with the concept of a data lifeboat

What should we do when a digital service sinks?

This is something that George spoke about at the final dConstruct in 2022. You can listen to the talk on the dConstruct archive.

I try to get back to Ireland a few times a year to see my mother. At some point in each trip there’s a social gathering with her friends or family. Inevitably the talk turns to ailments, illnesses, and complaints. I sit there quietly and nod politely.

2023 was the year I joined in.

If it wasn’t relaying my experience of visits to the emergency room, it was talk of my sinuses acting up and keeping me awake at night with their noises. Nasal polyps perhaps? And lately I’ve been having this wheezy asthma-like issue at night, what with this chesty cough I’ve been trying to sha… you get how uninteresting this is, right?

So I’ve got some nagging health issues. But I consider myself lucky. In the grand scheme of things, they aren’t big deals. Even the allergy which requires me to carry an epi-pen is to the easily-avoidable Ibuprofun, not to some ubiquitous foodstuff.

In fact I’ve had just enough health issues to give me a nice dose of perspective and appreciate all the times when my body is functioning correctly. I often think of what Maciej wrote about perspective:

The good news is, as you get older, you gain perspective. Perspective helps alleviate burnout.

The bad news is, you gain perspective by having incredibly shitty things happen to you and the people you love. Nature has made it so that perspective is only delivered in bulk quantities. A railcar of perspective arrives and dumps itself on your lawn when all you needed was a microgram. This is a grossly inefficient aspect of the human condition, but I’m sure bright minds in Silicon Valley are working on a fix.

Hence my feeling fortunate. 2023 was a perfectly grand year for me.

I went on some great adventures with Jessica. In the middle of the year we crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Mary II with our friends Dan and Sue, then we explored New York, and then we relaxed on Saint Augustine Beach for a week. Lovely!

The week in Ortigia, Sicily was great. So was the week in Cáceres, Spain. And the week spent playing music in Belfast during the trad festival was a blast.

There was lots of music closer to home too. Brighton is blessed with plenty of Irish music sessions and I’m doing my best to get to all of them. Playing mandolin in a session is my happy place.

Other music is also available. The band had an excellent year with the addition of our brilliant drummer, Matthew. We made such fast progress on new material that we managed to get into the studio to record an album’s worth of songs. Expect a new Salter Cane album in 2024!

On the work front, my highlights were event-based. I curated and hosted UX London. I spoke at a bunch of other events, and I think I did a good job. I spoke at no online events, and that’s the way I’d like to keep it. I thrive on giving talks at in-person gatherings. I hope I can continue to do that in 2024.

I very much enjoyed having a four-day work week in 2023. I don’t think I could ever go back to a five-day week. In fact, for 2024 I’m dabbling with a three-day work week. I’m luckily I can afford to do this. Given the choice, I’d rather have more time than more money. I know not everyone has that choice.

My hope for 2024 is for pretty much more of the same as I got in 2023. More music. More travel. But fewer health issues.

When I was summarising 2022, I said:

I’ve got my health. That’s something I don’t take for granted.

I’ve still (mostly) got my health. I definitely don’t take it for granted. Here’s to a happy and healthy 2024.

This time last year when I was looking back on 2021, I wrote:

2020 was the year of the virus. 2021 was the year of the vaccine …and the virus, obviously, but still it felt like the year we fought back. With science!

Science continued to win the battle in 2022. But it was messy. The Situation isn’t over yet, and everyone has different ideas about the correct levels of risk-taking.

It’s like when you’re driving and you think that everyone going faster than you is a maniac, and everyone going slower than you is an idiot.

The world opened up more in 2022. I was able to speak at more in-person events. I really missed that. I think I’m done with doing online talks.

There was a moment when I was speaking at Web Dev Conf in Bristol this year (a really nice little gathering), and during my presentation I was getting that response from the audience that you just don’t get with online talks, and I distinctly remember thinking, “Oh, I’ve really missed this!”

But like I said, The Situation isn’t over, and that makes things tricky for conferences. Most of the ones I spoke at or attended were doing their best to make things safe. CSS Day, Clarity, State Of The Browser: they all took measures to try to look out for everyone’s health.

For my part, I asked everyone attending dConstruct to take a COVID test the day before. Like I said at the time, I may have just been fooling myself with what might have been hygiene theatre, but like those other events, we all wanted to gather safely.

That can’t be said for the gigantic event in Berlin that I spoke at in Summer. There were tens of thousands of people in the venue. Inevitably, I—and others—caught COVID.

My bout of the ’rona wasn’t too bad, and I’m very glad that I didn’t pass it on to any family members (that’s been my biggest worry throughout The Situation). But it did mean that I wasn’t able to host UX London 2022.

That was a real downer. I spent much of 2022 focused on event curation: first UX London, and then dConstruct. I was really, really proud of the line-up I assembled for UX London so I was gutted not to be able to introduce those fabulous speakers in person.

Still, I got to host dConstruct, Leading Design, and Clarity, so 2022 was very much a bumper year for MCing—something I really, really enjoy.

Already I’ve got more of the same lined up for the first half of 2023: hosting Leading Design San Francisco in February and curating and hosting UX London in June.

I hope to do more speaking too. Alas, An Event Apart is no more, which is a real shame. But I hope there are other conferences out there that might be interested in what I have to say. If you’re organising one, get in touch.

Needless to say, 2022 was not a good year for world events. The callous and cruel invasion of Ukraine rightly dominated the news (sporting events and dead monarchs are not the defining events of the year). But even in the face of this evil, there’s cause for hope, seeing the galvanised response of the international community in standing up to Putin the bully.

In terms of more personal bad news, Jamie’s death is hard to bear.

I got to play lots of music in 2022. That’s something I definitely want to continue. In fact, 2023 kicked off with a great kitchen session yesterday evening—the perfect start to the year!

And I’ve got my health. That’s something I don’t take for granted.

One year ago, I wrote:

Maybe 2022 will turn out to be similar—shitty for a lot of people, and mostly unenventful for me. Or perhaps 2022 will be a year filled with joyful in-person activities, like conferences and musical gatherings. Either way, I’m ready.

For the most part, that played out. 2022 was thankfully fairly uneventful personally. And it was indeed a good year for in-person connections. I very much hope that continues in 2023.

I’m taking a nice long weekend break after dConstruct on Friday (I will of course have more to say on that—I’m collecting my thoughts still—but it was a wonderful day).

On Saturday I did absolutely nothing. It was just as well really, considering that I may have over-indulged in the pub on Friday evening after dConstruct was done. So a day of lounging around idly playing mandolin was just the ticket.

Yesterday, Sunday, I had one of those perfect leisurely days.

It began with a good bout of lazing about in the morning. Then, as lunchtime approached, Jessica and I went to a nearby pub for a Sunday Roast. In this case it was the Dover Castle. It turned out to be an excellent choice—top notch roasts!

While we were enjoying our lunch, Jessica spotted a poster on the wall for Bark In The Park, a local fun day of dog-centred activities. We were sure it had already happened earlier in Summer, but the poster said it was rescheduled to …yesterday!

So after lunch we went to the park and spent the next few hours in the sunshine, petting very good dogs and enjoying the spectacle of such catgories as “fancy dress”, “best rescue”, and “sausage catching.” We left shortly before the announcement of “best in show”—my money was on Mayhem—so I could nip home, grab my mandolin, and head to The Bugle pub for the weekly 4pm Irish music session.

After two hours of jigs’n’reels, I headed home. The weather was still lovely. The forecast was for cloudy weather, but it was unexpectedly sunny. So I fired up the outdoor grill.

We grilled: one aubergine, halved and scored; one yellow courgette, halved; one green courgette, halved; half a hispe cabbage, quartered. Once they were nicely charred outside and soft within, we ate them with a drizzle of tahini sauce, accompanied by a green salad.

By that time the sun had gone down and it was time for a nice evening spent watching the latest episode of The Rings Of Power and drinking a nice cup of tea.

Like I said, a perfect leisurely day.

If you’re travelling around Ireland, you may come across some odd pieces of 19th century architecture—walls, bridges, buildings and roads that serve no purpose. They date back to The Great Hunger of the 1840s. These “famine follies” were the result of a public works scheme.

The thinking went something like this: people are starving so we should feed them but we can’t just give people food for nothing so let’s make people do pointless work in exchange for feeding them (kind of like an early iteration of proof of work for cryptobollocks on blockchains …except with a blockchain, you don’t even get a wall or a road, just ridiculous amounts of wasted energy).

This kind of thinking seems reprehensible from today’s perspective. But I still see its echo in the work ethic espoused by otherwise smart people.

Here’s the thing: there’s good work and there’s working hard. What matters is doing good work. Often, to do good work you need to work hard. And so people naturally conflate the two, thinking that what matters is working hard. But whether you work hard or not isn’t actually what’s important. What’s important is that you do good work.

If you can do good work without working hard, that’s not a bad thing. In fact, it’s great—you’ve managed to do good work and do it efficiently! But often this very efficiency is treated as laziness.

Sensible managers are rightly appalled by so-called productivity tracking because it measures exactly the wrong thing. Those instruments of workplace surveillance measure inputs, not outputs (and even measuring outputs is misguided when what really matters are outcomes).

They can attempt to measure how hard someone is working, but they don’t even attempt to measure whether someone is producing good work. If anything, they actively discourage good work; there’s plenty of evidence to show that more hours equates to less quality.

I used to think that must be some validity to the belief that hard work has intrinsic value. It was a position that was espoused so often by those around me that it seemed a truism.

But after a few decades of experience, I see no evidence for hard work as an intrinsically valuable activity, much less a useful measurement. If anything, I’ve seen the real harm that can be caused by tying your self-worth to how much you’re working. That way lies burnout.

We no longer make people build famine walls or famine roads. But I wonder how many of us are constructing little monuments in our inboxes and calendars, filling those spaces with work to be done in an attempt to chase the rewards we’ve been told will result from hard graft.

I’d rather spend my time pursuing the opposite: the least work for the most people.

I no longer have Covid. I am released from isolation.

Alas, my negative diagnosis came too late for me to make it to UX London. But that’s okay—by the third and final day of the event, everything was running smooth like buttah! Had I shown up, I would’ve just got in the way. The Clearleft crew ran the event like a well-oiled machine.

I am in the coronaclear just in time to go away for a week. My original thinking was this would be my post-UX-London break to rest up for a while, but it turns out I’ve been getting plenty of rest during UX London.

I’m heading to the west coast of Ireland for The Willie Clancy Summer School, a trad music pilgrimage.

Jessica and I last went to Willie Week in 2019. We had a great time and I distinctly remember thinking “I’m definitely coming back next year!”

Well, a global pandemic put paid to that. The event ran online for the past two years. But now that it’s back for real, I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

My mandolin and I are bound for Miltown Malbay!

That event in Berlin last week was by far the largest gathering of humans I’ve been with in over two years. If I was going to finally succumb to the ’rona, this was likely to be the place and time.

Sure enough, on my last day in Berlin I had a bit of a scratchy throat. I remained masked for the rest of the day for the travel back to England. Once I was back home I immediately tested and …nothing.

I guess it was just a regular sore throat after all.

Over the weekend the sore throat was accompanied by some sniffles. Just your typical cold symptoms. But I decided to be prudent and test again yesterday.

This time a very clear result was revealed. It was Covid-19 after all.

Today I was supposed to be travelling to Lille on the Eurostar to speak at a private event. Instead I’m isolating at home. My symptoms are quite mild. I feel worse about letting down the event organisers.

Still, better to finally get the novel coronavirus now rather than later in the month. I would hate to miss UX London. But I’m confident I’ll be recovered and testing negative by then.

For now I’ll be taking it easy and letting those magnificent vaccines do their work.

There was a week recently where I was out and about nearly every night.

One night, Jessica and I went to the cinema. There was a double bill of Alien and Aliens in the beautiful Duke of York’s picture house. We booked one of the comfy sofas on the balcony.

The next night we were out at the session in The Jolly Brewer, playing trad Irish tunes all evening. Bliss!

Then on the third night, we went to see Low playing in a church. Rich and Ben were there too.

It really felt like The Before Times. Of course in reality it wasn’t quite like old times. There’s always an awareness of relative risk. How crowded is the cinema likely to be? Will they have the doors open at The Jolly Brewer to improve the airflow? Will people at the Low gig comply with the band’s request to wear masks?

Still, in each case, I weighed the risk and decided the evening was worth it. If I caught Covid because of that cinematic double bill, or that tune-filled gathering, or that excellent gig, that price would be acceptable.

Mind you, I say that without having experienced the horribleness of having a nasty bout of coronavirus. And the prospect of long Covid is genuinely scary.

But there’s no doubt that the vaccines have changed the equation. There’s still plenty of risk but it’s on a different scale. The Situation isn’t over, but it has ratcheted down a notch to something more manageable.

Now with the weather starting to get nice, there’ll be more opportunities for safer outdoor gatherings. I’m here for it.

Actually, I’m not going to literally be here for all of it. I’m making travel plans to go and speak at European events—another positive signal of the changing situation. Soon I’ll be boarding the Eurostar to head to Amsterdam, and not long after I’ll be on the Eurostar again for a trip to Lille. And then of course there’s UX London at the end of June. With each gathering, there’s an inevitable sense of calculated risk, but there’s also a welcome sense of normality seeping back in.

February is a tough month at the best of times. A February during The Situation is particularly grim.

At least in December you get Christmas, whose vibes can even carry you through most of January. But by the time February rolls around, it’s all grim winteriness with no respite in sight.

In the middle of February, Jessica caught the ’rona. On the bright side, this wasn’t the worst timing: if this had happened in December, our Christmas travel plans to visit family would’ve been ruined. On the not-so-bright side, catching a novel coronavirus is no fun.

Still, the vaccines did their job. Jessica felt pretty crap for a couple of days but was on the road to recovery before too long.

Amazingly, I did not catch the ’rona. We slept in separate rooms, but still, we were spending most of our days together in the same small flat. Given the virulence of The Omicron Variant, I’m counting my blessings.

But just in case I got any ideas about having some kind of superhuman immune system, right after Jessica had COVID-19, I proceeded to get gastroenteritis. I’ll spare you the details, but let me just say it was not pretty.

Amazingly, Jessica did not catch it. I guess two years of practicing intense hand-washing pays off when a stomach bug comes a-calling.

So all in all, not a great February, even by February’s already low standards.

The one bright spot that I get to enjoy every February is my birthday, just as the month is finishing up. Last year I spent my birthday—the big five oh—in lockdown. But two years ago, right before the world shut down, I had a lovely birthday weekend in Galway. This year, as The Situation began to unwind and de-escalate, I thought it would be good to reprieve that birthday trip.

We went to Galway. We ate wonderful food at Aniar. We listened to some great trad music. We drink some pints. It was good.

But it was hard to enjoy the trip knowing what was happening elsewhere in Europe. I’d blame February for being a bastard again, but in this case the bastard is clearly Vladimar Putin. Fucker.

Just as it’s hard to switch off for a birthday break, it’s equally challenging to go back to work and continue as usual. It feels very strange to be spending the days working on stuff that clearly, in the grand scheme of things, is utterly trivial.

I take some consolation in the fact that everyone else feels this way too, and everyone is united in solidarity with Ukraine. (There are some people in my social media timelines who also feel the need to point out that other countries have been invaded and bombed too. I know it’s not their intention but there’s a strong “all lives matter” vibe to that kind of whataboutism. Hush.)

Anyway. February’s gone. It’s March. Things still feel very grim indeed. But perhaps, just perhaps, there’s a hint of Spring in the air. Winter will not last forever.

2020 was the year of the virus. 2021 was the year of the vaccine …and the virus, obviously, but still it felt like the year we fought back. With science!

Whenever someone writes and shares one of these year-end retrospectives the result is, by its very nature, personal. These last two years are different though. We all still have our own personal perspectives, but we also all share a collective experience of The Ongoing Situation.

Like, I can point to three pivotal events in 2021 and I bet you could point to the same three for you:

1. getting my first vaccine shot in March,
2. getting my second vaccine shot in June, and
3. getting my booster shot in December.

So while on the one hand we’re entering 2022 in a depressingly similar way to how we entered 2021 with COVID-19 running rampant, on the other hand, the odds have changed. We can calculate risk. We’ve got more information. And most of all, we’ve got these fantastic vaccines.

I summed up last year in terms of all the things I didn’t do. I could do the same for 2021, but there’s only one important thing that didn’t happen—I didn’t catch a novel coronavirus.

It’s not like I didn’t take some risks. While I was mostly a homebody, I did make excursions to Zürich and Lisbon. One long weekend in London was particurly risky.

At the end of the year, right as The Omicron Variant was ramping up, Jessica and I travelled to Ireland to see my mother, and then travelled to the States to see her family. We managed to dodge the Covid bullets both times, for which I am extremely grateful. My greatest fear throughout The Situation hasn’t been so much about catching Covid myself, but passing it on to others. If I were to give it to a family member or someone more vulnerable than me, I don’t think I could forgive myself.

Now that we’ve seen our families (after a two-year break!), I’m feeling more sanguine about this next stage. I’ll be hunkering down for the next while to ride out this wave, but if I still end up getting infected, at least I won’t have any travel plans to cancel.

But this is meant to be a look back at the year that’s just finished, not a battle plan for 2022.

There were some milestones in 2021:

1. I turned 50,
2. TheSession.org turned 20, and
3. Adactio.com also turned 20.

This means that my websites are ²/_5ths of my own age. In ten years time, my websites will be ¹/₂ of my own age.

Most of my work activities were necessarily online, though I did manage the aforementioned trips to Switzerland and Portugal to speak at honest-to-goodness real live in-person events. The major projects were:

1. Publishing season two of the Clearleft podcast in February,
2. Speaking at An Event Apart Online in April,
3. Hosting UX Fest in June,
4. Publishing season three of the Clearleft podcast in September, and
5. Writing a course on responsive design in November.

Outside of work, my highlights of 2021 mostly involved getting to play music with other people—something that didn’t happen much in 2020. Band practice with Salter Cane resumed in late 2021, as did some Irish music sessions. Both are now under an Omicron hiatus but this too shall pass.

Another 2021 highlight was a visit by Tantek in the summer. He was willing to undergo quarantine to get to Brighton, which I really appreciate. It was lovely hanging out with him, even if all our social activities were by necessity outdoors.

But, like I said, the main achievement in 2021 was not catching COVID-19, and more importantly, not passing it on to anyone else. Time will tell whether or not that winning streak will be sustainable in 2022. But at least I feel somewhat prepared for it now, thanks to those magnificent vaccines.

2021 was a shitty year for a lot of people. I feel fortunate that for me, it was merely uneventful. If my only complaint is that I didn’t get to travel and speak as much I’d like, well boo-fucking-hoo, I’ll take it. I’ve got my health. My family members have their health. I don’t take that for granted.

Maybe 2022 will turn out to be similar—shitty for a lot of people, and mostly unenventful for me. Or perhaps 2022 will be a year filled with joyful in-person activities, like conferences and musical gatherings. Either way, I’m ready.

I work a four-day week now.

It started with the first lockdown. Actually, for a while there, I was working just two days a week while we took a “wait and see” attitude at Clearleft to see how The Situation was going to affect work. We weathered that storm, but rather than going back to a full five-day week I decided to try switching to four days instead.

This meant taking a pay cut. Time is literally money when it comes to work. But I decided it was worth it. That’s a privileged position to be in, I know. I managed to pay off the mortgage on our home last year so that reduced some financial pressure. But I also turned fifty, which made me think that I should really be padding some kind of theoretical nest egg. Still, the opportunity to reduce working hours looked good to me.

The ideal situation would be to have everyone switch to a four-day week without any reduction in pay. Some companies have done that but it wasn’t an option for Clearleft, alas.

I’m not the only one working a four-day week at Clearleft. A few people were doing it even before The Situation. We all take Friday as our non-work day, which makes for a nice long three-day weekend.

What’s really nice is that Friday has been declared a “no meeting” day for everyone at Clearleft. That means that those of us working a four-day week know we’re not missing out on anything and it’s pretty nice for people working a five-day week to have a day free of appointments. We have our end-of-week all-hands wind-down on Thursday afternoons.

I haven’t experienced any reduction in productivity. Quite the opposite. There may be a corollay to Parkinson’s Law: work contracts to fill the time available.

At one time, a six-day work week was the norm. It may well be that a four-day work week becomes the default over time. That could dovetail nicely with increasing automation.

I’ve got to say, I’m really, really liking this. It’s quite nice that when Wednesday rolls around, I can say “it’s almost the weekend!”

A three-day weekend feels normal to me now. I could imagine tilting the balance even more over time. Maybe every few years I could reduce the working by a day or half a day. So instead of going from a full-on five-day working week straight into retirement, it would be more of a gentle ratcheting down over the years.

On June 3rd, 2001, I launched thesession.org. Happy twentieth birthday to The Session!

Although actually The Session predates its domain name by a few years. It originally launched as a subdirectory here on adactio.com with the unwieldly URL /session/session.shtml

That incarnation was more like a blog. I’d post the sheetmusic for a tune every week with a little bit of commentary. That worked fine until I started to run out of tunes. That’s when I made the site dynamic. People could sign up to become members of The Session. Then they could also post tunes and add comments.

That’s the version that is two decades old today.

The last really big change to the site happened in 2012. As well as a complete redesign, I introduced lots of new functionality.

In all of those incarnations, the layout was fluid …long before responsive design swept the web. That was quite unusual twenty years ago, but I knew it was the webby thing to do.

What’s also unusual is just keeping a website going for twenty years. Keeping a community website going for twenty years is practically unheard of. I’m very proud of The Session. Although, really, I’m just the caretaker. The site would literally be nothing without all the contributions that people have made.

I’ve more or less adopted a Wikipedia model for contributions. Some things, like tune settings, can only be edited by the person who submitted it But other things, like the track listing of a recording, or the details of a session, can be edited by any member of the site. And of course anyone can add a comment to any listing. There’s a certain amount of risk to that, but after testing it for two decades, it’s working out very nicely.

What’s really nice is when I get to meet my fellow members of The Session in meatspace. If I’m travelling somewhere and there’s a local session happening, I always get a warm welcome. I mean, presumably everyone would get a warm welcome at those sessions, but I’ve also had my fair share of free pints thanks to The Session.

I feel a great sense of responsibility with The Session. But it’s not a weight of responsibility—the way that many open source maintainers describe how their unpaid labour feels. The sense of responsibility I feel drives me. It gives me a sense of purpose.

The Session is older than any client work I’ve ever done. It’s older than any books I’ve written. It’s even older than Clearleft by a few years. Heck, it’s even older than this blog (just).

I’m 50 years old now. The Session is 20 years old. That’s quite a chunk of my life. I think it’s fair to say that it’s part of me now. Of all the things I’ve made so far in my life, The Session is the one I’m proudest of.

I’m looking forward to stewarding the site through the next twenty years.

Phil turned 50 around the same time as I did. He took the opportunity to write some half-century notes. I thoroughly enjoyed reading them and it got me thinking about my own five decades of life.

0–10

A lot happened in the first few years. I was born in England but my family back moved to Ireland when I was three. Then my father died not long after that. I was young enough that I don’t really have any specific memories of that time. I have hazy impressionistic images of London in my mind but at this point I don’t know if they’re real or imagined.

10–20

Most of this time was spent being a youngster in Cobh, county Cork. All fairly uneventful. Being a teenage boy, I was probably a dickhead more than I realised at the time. It was also the 80s so there was a lot of shittiness happening in the background: The Troubles; Chernobyl; Reagan and Thatcher; the constant low-level expectation of nuclear annihilation. And most of the music was terrible—don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

20–30

This was the period with the most new experiences. I started my twenties by dropping out of Art College in Cork and moving to Galway to be a full-time slacker. I hitch-hiked and busked around Europe. I lived in Canada for six months. Eventually I ended up in Freiburg in southern Germany where I met Jessica. The latter half of this decade was spent there, settling down a bit. I graduated from playing music on the street to selling bread in a bakery to eventually making websites. Before I turned 30, Jessica and I got married.

30–40

We move to Brighton! I continue to make websites and play music with Salter Cane. Half way through my thirties I co-found Clearleft with Andy and Rich. I also start writing books and speaking at conferences. I find that not only is this something I enjoy, but it’s something I’m actually good at. And it gives me the opportunity to travel and see more of the world.

40–50

It’s more of the same for the next ten years. More Clearleft, more writing, more speaking and travelling. Jessica and I got a mortgage on a flat at the start of the decade and exactly ten years later we’ve managed to pay it off, which feels good (I don’t like having any debt hanging over me).

That last decade certainly feels less eventful than, say, that middle decade but then, isn’t that the way with most lives? As Phil says:

If my thirties went by more quickly than my twenties, my forties just zipped by.

You’ve got the formative years in your 20s when you’re trying to figure yourself out so you’re constantly dabbling in a bit of everything (jobs, music, drugs, travel) and then things get straighter. So when it comes to memories, your brain can employ a more rigourous compression algorithm. Instead of storing each year separately, your memories are more like a single year times five or ten. And so it feels like time passes much quicker in later life than it did in those more formative experimental years.

But experimentation can be stressful too—“what if I never figure it out‽” Having more routine can be satisfying if you’re reasonably confident you’ve chosen a good path. I feel like I have (but then, so do most people).

Now it’s time for the next decade. In the short term, the outlook is for more of the same—that’s the outlook for everyone while the world is on pause for The Situation. But once that’s over, who knows? I intend to get back to travelling and seeing the world. That’s probably more to do with being stuck in one place for over a year than having mid-century itchy feet.

I don’t anticipate any sudden changes in lifestyle or career. If anything, I plan to double down on doing things I like and saying “no” to any activities I now know I don’t like. So my future will almost certainly involve more websites, more speaking, maybe more writing, and definitely more Irish traditional music.

I feel like having reached the milestone of 50, I should have at least a few well-earned pieces of advice to pass on. The kind of advice I wish I had received when I was younger. But I’ve racked my brains and this is all I’ve got:

Never eat an olive straight off the tree. You know this already but maybe part of your mind thinks “how bad can it be really?” Trust me. It’s disgusting.

Today is my birthday. I am one twentieth of a millenium old. I am eighteen and a quarter kilo-days old. I am six hundred months old. I am somewhere in the order of 26.28 mega-minutes old. I am fifty years old.

The reflected light of the sun that left Earth when I was born has passed Alpha Cephei and will soon reach Delta Aquilae. In that time, our solar system has completed 0.00002% of its orbit around the centre of our galaxy.

I was born into a world with the Berlin Wall. That world ended when I turned eighteen.

Fifty years before I was born, the Irish war of independence was fought while the world was recovering from an influenza pandemic.

Fifty years after I was born, the UK is beginning its post-Brexit splintering while the world is in the middle of a coronavirus pandemic.

In the past few years, I started to speculate about what I might do for the big Five Oh. Should I travel somewhere nice? Or should I throw a big party and invite everyone I know?

Neither of those are options now. The decision has been made for me. I will have a birthday (and subsequent weekend) filled with the pleasures of home. I plan to over-indulge with all my favourite foods, lovingly prepared by Jessica. And I want the finest wines available to humanity—I want them here and I want them now.

I will also, inevitably, be contemplating the passage of time. I’m definitely of an age now where I’ve shifted from “explore” to “exploit.” In other words, I’ve pretty much figured out what I like doing. That is in contrast to the many years spent trying to figure out how I should be spending my time. Now my plans are more about maximising what I know I like and minimising everything else. What I like mostly involves Irish traditional music and good food.

So that’s what I’ll be doubling down on for my birthday weekend.

Colin wrote about his typical day and suggested I do the same.

Y’know, in the Before Times I think this would’ve been trickier. What with travelling and speaking, I didn’t really have a “typical” day …and I liked it that way. Now, thanks to The Situation, my days are all pretty similar.

• 8:30am — This is the time I’ve set my alarm for, but sometimes I wake up a bit earlier. I get up, fire up the coffee machine, go to the head and empty my bladder. Maybe I’ll have a shower.
• 9am — I fire up email and Slack, wishing my co-workers a good morning. Over the course of each day, I’ve usually got short 1:1s booked in with two or three of my colleagues. Just fifteen minutes or so to catch up and find out what they’re working on, what’s interesting, what’s frustrating. The rest of the time, I’ll probably be working on the Clearleft podcast.
• 1pm — Lunch time. Jessica takes her lunch break at the same time. We’ll usually have a toasted sandwich or a bowl of noodles. While we eat, Jessica will quiz me with the Learned League questions she’s already answered that morning. I get all the fun of testing my knowledge without the pressure of competing.
• 2pm — If the weather’s okay, we might head out for a brisk walk, probably to the nearby park where we can watch good doggos. Otherwise, it’s back to the podcast mines. I’ve already amassed a fair amount of raw material from interviews, so I’m spending most of my time in Descript, crafting and editing each episode. In about three hours of work, I reckon I get four or five minutes of good audio together. I should really be working on my upcoming talk for An Event Apart too, but I’m procrastinating. But I’m procrastinating by doing the podcast, so I’ve kind of tricked myself into doing something I’m supposed to be doing by avoiding something else I’m supposed to be doing.
• Sometime between 5pm and 6pm — I knock off work. I pick up my mandolin and play some tunes. If Jessica’s done with work too, we play some tunes together.
• 7pm — If it’s a Tuesday or Thursday, then it’s a ballet night for Jessica. While she’s in the kitchen doing her class online, I chill out in the living room, enjoying a cold beer, listening to some music with headphones on, and doing some reading or writing. I might fire up NetNewsWire and read the latest RSS updates from my friends, or I might write a blog post.
• 8pm — If it is a ballet night, then dinner will be something quick and easy to prepare; probably pasta. Otherwise there’s more time to prepare something with care and love. Jessica is the culinary genius so my contributions are mostly just making sure she’s got her mise en place ahead of time, and cleaning up afterwards. I choose a bottle of wine and set the table, and then we sit down to eat together. It is definitely the highlight of the day.
• 9pm — After cleaning up, I make us both cups of tea and we settle in on the sofa to watch some television. Not broadcast television; something on the Apple TV from Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, or BBC iPlayer most likely. If we’re in the right mood, we’ll watch a film.
• Sometime between 11pm and midnight — I change into my PJs, brush and floss my teeth, and climb into bed with a good book. When I feel my eyelids getting heavy, I switch off the light and go to sleep. That’s where I’m a Viking!

That’s a typical work day. My work week is Monday to Thursday. I switched over to a four-day week when The Situation hit, and now I don’t ever want to go back. It means making less money, but it’s worth it for a three day weekend.

My typical weekend involves more mandolin playing, more reading, more movies, and even better meals. I’ll also do some chores: clean the floors; back up my data.

In 2020, I didn’t have the honour and privilege of speaking at An Event Apart in places like Seattle, Boston, and Minneapolis. I didn’t experience that rush that comes from sharing ideas with a roomful of people, getting them excited, making them laugh, sparking thoughts. I didn’t enjoy the wonderful and stimulating conversations with my peers that happen in the corridors, or over lunch, or at an after-party. I didn’t have a blast catching up with old friends or making new ones.

But the States wasn’t the only country I didn’t travel to. Closer to home, I didn’t have the opportunity to take the Eurostar and connecting trains to cities like Cologne, Lisbon, and Stockholm. I didn’t sample the food and drink of different countries.

In the summer, I didn’t travel to the west coast of Ireland for the second in year in a row for the annual Willie Clancy festival of traditional Irish music. I didn’t spend each day completely surrounded by music. I didn’t play in some great sessions. I didn’t hear some fantastic and inspiring musicians.

Back here in Brighton, I didn’t go to the session in The Jolly Brewer every Wednesday evening and get lost in the tunes. I didn’t experience that wonderful feeling of making music together and having a pint or two. And every second Sunday afternoon, I didn’t pop along to The Bugle for more jigs and reels.

I didn’t walk into work most days, arrive at the Clearleft studio, and make a nice cup of coffee while chit-chatting with my co-workers. I didn’t get pulled into fascinating conversations about design and development that spontaneously bubble up when you’re in the same space as talented folks.

Every few months, I didn’t get a haircut.

Throughout the year, I didn’t make any weekend trips back to Ireland to visit my mother.

2020 gave me a lot of free time. I used that time to not write a book. And with all that extra time on my hands, I read fewer books than I had read in 2019. Oh, and on the side, I didn’t learn a new programming language. I didn’t discover an enthusiasm for exercise. I didn’t get out of the house and go for a brisk walk on most days. I didn’t start each day prepping my sourdough.

But I did stay at home, thereby slowing the spread of a deadly infectious disease. I’m proud of that.

I did play mandolin. I did talk to my co-workers through a screen. I did eat very well—and very local and seasonal. I did watch lots of television programmes and films. I got by. Sometimes I even took pleasure in this newly-enforced lifestyle.

I made it through 2020. And so did you. That’s an achievement worth celebrating—congratulations!

Let’s see what 2021 doesn’t bring.

Episode three of the Clearleft podcast is here!

This one is a bit different. Whereas previous episodes focused on specific topics—design systems, service design—this one is a case study. And, wow, what a case study! The whole time I was putting the episode together, I kept thinking “The team really did some excellent work here.”

I’m not sure what makes more sense: listen to the podcast episode first and then visit the site in question …or the other way around? Maybe the other way around. In which case, be sure to visit the website for Wildlife Photographer Of The Year.

That’s right—Clearleft got to work with London’s Natural History Museum! A real treat.

This episode of the podcast ended up being half an hour long. It should probably be shorter but I just couldn’t bring myself to cut any of the insights that Helen, James, Chris, and Trys were sharing. I’m probably too close to the subject matter to be objective about it. I’m hoping that others will find it equally fascinating to hear about the process of the project. Research! Design! Dev! This has got it all.

I had a lot of fun with the opening of the episode. I wanted to create a montage effect like the scene-setting opening of a film that has overlapping news reports. I probably spent far too long doing it but I’m really happy with the final result.

And with this episode, we’re halfway through the first season of the podcast already! I figured a nice short run of six episodes is enough to cover a fair bit of ground and give a taste of what the podcast is aiming for, without it turning into an overwhelming number of episodes in a backlog for you to catch up with. Three down and three to go. Seems manageable, right?

Anyway, enough of the backstory. If you haven’t already subscribed to the Clearleft podcast, you should do that. Then do these three things in whichever order you think works best:

• Visit the website for Wildlife Photographer Of The Year.
• Read the case study on the Clearleft website.
• Listen to episode three of the Clearleft podcast

Probably fewer than a hundred people in the world have seen what you’re looking at right now.

Jessica and I were taking turns at the microscope when we were told that.

Let me back up a bit and explain how we found ourselves in this this situation…

It all started with The Session, the traditional Irish music community site that I run. There’s a big focus on getting together and playing music—something that’s taken a big hit during this global pandemic. Three sections of the website are devoted to face-to-face gatherings: events (like concerts and festivals), sessions, and the most recent addition, trips.

The idea with trips is that you input somewhere you’re going to be travelling to, along with the dates you’ll be there. It’s like a hyper-focused version of Dopplr. The site then shows you if any events are happening, if there are any sessions on, and also if there are any members of the site in that locality (if those members have added their location to their profiles).

Last August, I added the trips I would be taking in the States. There’s be a trip to Saint Augustine to hang out with Jessica’s family, a trip to Chicago to speak at An Event Apart, and a trip to New York for a couple of days because that’s where the ocean liner was going to deposit us after our transatlantic crossing.

A fellow member of The Session named Aaron who is based in New York saw my trip and contacted me to let me know about the session he goes to (he plays tin whistle). Alas, that session didn’t coincide with our short trip. But he also added:

I work at the American Museum of Natural History, and if you have time and interest, I can provide you with vouchers for tickets to as many special exhibits and such as you’d like!

Ooh, that sounded like fun! He also said:

In fact I could give you a quick behind-the-scenes tour if you’re interested.

Jessica and I didn’t have any set plans for our time in New York, so we said why not?

That’s how we ended spending a lovely afternoon being shown around the parts of the museum that the public don’t usually get to see. It’s quite the collection of curiosities back there!

There’s also plenty of research. Aaron’s particular area was looking into an entirely different kingdom of life—neither animal, nor plant, nor fungus. Remarkably, these microscopic creatures were first identified—by a classmate of Aaron’s—by happenstance in 2016:

The hemimastigotes analyzed by the Dalhousie team were found by Eglit during a spring hike with some other students along the Bluff Wilderness Trail outside Halifax a couple of years ago. She often has empty sample vials in her pockets or bags, and scooped a few tablespoons of dirt into one of them from the side of the trail.

That’s like a doctor announcing that they’d come across a hitherto-unknown limb on the human body. The findings were published in the paper, Hemimastigophora is a novel supra-kingdom-level lineage of eukaryotes in 2018.

In the “backstage” area of the American Museum of Natural History, Aaron had samples of them. He put them under the microscope for us. As we took turns looking at them wriggling their flagella, Aaron said:

Probably fewer than a hundred people in the world have seen what you’re looking at right now.

Yesterday was Wednesday. Wednesday evening is when I play in an Irish trad session at The Jolly Brewer. It’s a highlight of my week.

Needless to say, there was no session yesterday. I’ll still keep playing tunes while we’re all socially distancing, but it’s not quite the same. I concur with this comment:

COVID-19 has really made me realize that we need to be grateful for the people and activities we take for granted. Things like going out for food, seeing friends, going to the gym, etc., are fun, but are not essential for (physical) survival.

It reminds of Brian Eno’s definition of art: art is anything we don’t have to do. It’s the same with social activities. We don’t have to go to concerts—we can listen to music at home. We don’t have to go the cinema—we can watch films at home. We don’t have to go to conferences—we can read books and blog posts at home. We don’t have to go out to restaurants—all our nutritional needs can be met at home.

But it’s not the same though, is it?

I think about the book Station Eleven a lot. The obvious reason why I’d be thinking about it is that it describes a deadly global pandemic. But that’s not it. Even before The Situation, Station Eleven was on my mind for helping provide clarity on the big questions of life; y’know, the “what’s it all about?” questions like “what’s the meaning of life?”

Part of the reason I think about Station Eleven is its refreshingly humanist take on a post-apocalyptic society. As I discussed on this podcast episode a few years back:

It’s interesting to see a push-back against the idea that if society is removed we are going to revert to life being nasty, brutish and short. Things aren’t good after this pandemic wipes out civilisation, but people are trying to put things back together and get along and rebuild.

Related to that, Station Eleven describes a group of people in a post-pandemic world travelling around performing Shakespeare plays. At first I thought this was a ridiculous conceit. Then I realised that this was the whole point. We don’t have to watch Shakespeare to survive. But there’s a difference between surviving and living.

I’m quite certain that one positive outcome of The Situation will be a new-found appreciation for activities we don’t have to do. I’m looking forward to sitting in a pub with a friend or two, or going to see a band, or a play or a film, and just thinking “this is nice.”

So that was 2019. Quite a year.

Looking back, there were some real highlights for me…

• Going to CERN in February to be part of the project to recreate the first web browser was like a dream come true. It really was an honour and a privilege to be part of it.
• In July, I returned to Miltown Malbay for the Willie Clancy Summer School after an unreasonably long hiatus of fifteen years. I had a great time immersed in traditional Irish music.
• In August, Jessica and I crossed the Atlantic on board the Queen Mary 2. That was an unforgettable experience.

Then there were the usual benefits that come with speaking at international conferences like An Event Apart and Beyond Tellerrand. I got to visit interesting places, eat excellent food, and meet good people.

Not everything was rosy. There were some sad life events for friends and family. And of course the whole political situation here in the UK has been just awful in 2019.

So onwards to 2020. I need to remind myself that many things are going well in the world but it can be hard to keep that in mind. At a local—nay, parochial—level, there’s a good chance that 2020 will deliver a hard Brexit. I have no faith in the competence or motivations of the current government to do otherwise (I keep reminding myself that I don’t have to stay in this country if it falls apart). And at the global scale, our attempts to mitigate the climate crisis are proceeding too slowly.

That’s something I need to take more personal responsibility for in 2020: fewer plane journeys, more trains, and more carbon offsetting.

Ultimately, it’s a fairly arbitrary moment in time but I do like to pause for a moment and look back at the year that’s just been. For all its faults, I have happy memories. I’m healthy. I played lots of music. I ate well. I spent time with friends and family.

I look forward to more of that in the third decade of the 21st century.