Tada!
I found and immediately smashed the follow button on a dev on BlueSky who shared their own start with writing , and I love their take on it. So, freshly inspired, I’m doing my own take on this as well. Sitting down to write on a Sunday with a cold brew in hand is a weekly ritual I think I’m going to enjoy.
I’ve know roughly what weeknotes were from my time working with developers in tech for the last 15 years, but I’ve never really considered using it in a more creative way. It has a lot of potential to help me organize and reset each week while I mentally go over what I worked on and what goals I hit each week. I’m also a big fan of how @natalie.sh incorporates the comments on their BlueSky post below the weeknotes entry on their site, so I’m working on writing up some code to replicate something similar.
If you like this and start doing your own weeknotes, let me know! I’d love to follow along.
What did I do this week
Digital Wellbeing
This week started off on a good note with a very creative weekend fueling a good Monday at work. I love those kinds of Mondays. They feel rare but probably aren’t that hard to have more often with a mindset change. I made a point on Sunday to commit to a digital purge of sorts paired with finally moving off platforms that I have no interest in supporting or that create a security concern for me due to the politics in this country at the moment. I started the process of migrating off Google where I can for the second time and it’s feeling much more functional this time thanks to both a community of people who are also contributing to a “degoogled” process as well as more support for alternatives from companies that were not that attractive a couple years ago. The process continues because unraveling yourself from Google after 20 years of heavy immersion in their services is a grind.
The adjustment to old habits and attention sinks that I had up until a couple weeks ago is definitely uncomfortable and expected and I’ve had an interesting time observing how this impacts my time and what surfaces now that I’m not freely dissociating as much. It’s given creativity more time to bubble up which I expected, but combating the need to move and shift and let my ADHD hop where it needs to now that I can’t pacify it with a visual black hole is an interesting challenge.
Wireframing
I dusted off Figma at the start of the week and got to work wireframing my website to get a visual theme and some cohesion going. I’m essentially building two websites, one that functions as a portfolio/about me and another that hosts weeknotes and allows for more coding and programming practice. To do that, I need a bridge between the two to make them feel like one site while having separation in my hosting and file structure. Wireframing for my main site is about 80% complete while the other has a first draft “complete” wireframe at 100% with future updates already in the works.
Writing
I did some initial research and some very minimal outlining for my next blog post on digital art, but put the majority of my writing time into getting inspiration from other developers and creatives on their take on weeknotes and, naturally, their site layouts. Weeknotes have captured my attention fully and scratch an itch I’ve had for a while, can’t you tell?
The rest of my writing energy this week went into actually writing and planning out my 2025 content calendar so I have some organization in place for my weekly writing goals, podcast episodes, and one off articles. There’s little space for work on my book, but my brain is minimally invested in that right now and it continues to sit on the shelf waiting for me to tap into the void of memory that is my childhood to continue the process.
Podcast
Riding the wave of website work and creative energy, I took an evening to rethink what did and didn’t work for me in my podcast that I had tied and produced last year in alignment with a creative project called Grind.EXP that primarily lived on Instagram. I had loosely labeled it as a “failure” with the understanding that it had insights to learn from to improve and change how I did it in the future.
I love podcasting, but it can sometimes feel like all the work to produce doesn’t have the same dopamine return I’d expect after the writing, research, and recording happens. The best part of a podcast is the creative aspect, and I took that and ran with it which resulted in a new approach, visual look, and relaxing on some of the more aggressively structured parts. I now have evolved my old podcast into this new thing called “Thoroughly Overthinking It” drawing inspiration from the shows I listen to regularly to help create a channel that feels more like me and gets me excited to start contributing to again. Next week will be a recording and writing week for new bimonthly episodes in March and on.
What did I learn this week
Web Design
While I’ve used Figma a lot over the last 3 years, it’s mostly been visualizing workflows and processes for my job. I spent some time finally unpacking the pile of saved videos and articles on web design application and I kind of love it. There’s a lot more to learn here and I’m looking forward to using my own websites to practice. Animation in Figma will be trip.
One of the accessibility elements I am incorporating in my website is dark mode. I started just looking for some basic guidelines on how to implement it correctly and got sucked into how it impacts UI in general. I’m familiar with the Material Design from Google and have spent a decent amount of time looking at that framework, but it just gets deeper the longer you spend digging into how it’s structured. I probably won’t spend too much time in the immediate future continuing this deep dive, but I’m definitely bookmarking it for later.
Markdown
I’ve flirted with writing in markdown for years. It started when I considered moving from Evernote to Bear back when Bear first launched, and it has surfaced in a variety of apps since. I’ve never spent any time actually trying to learn how to write and memorize the pieces or get invested in the different flavors of it, like GitHub’s GFM dialect, but the application in and enhancement to web design process and writing generally are enough that it’s on my radar in a bigger way now. I just need to practice (like I am now writing in Ulysses) and get it more cemented in my brain meat.
What stumped me this week
WordPress never fails to frustrate me when it comes to working with the various plugins and customized elements. I know enough to know that the plugins do make long-term maintenance easier, but I’m always more comfortable directly manipulating the code to make it do what I want. This week was not an easy week for the more complicated javascript I wanted to implement and I’m still a bit stuck on how some of the code I wrote is conflicting with the larger WP code getting in the way.
What did I listen to this week
I needed some easy listening, so I went through most of IU’s discography while I was at work at the day job this week. Specifically Palette.
The Luxury Podcast is a new evolution of the Keeping Up Appearances fan podcast by Jonathan Vernon-Smith and William Hanson and has all the easy, funny energy you need. If you loved KUA like I do, you’ll enjoy these two taking the vibe of the show and making a topical discussion out of it.
I had a few breaks in “easy” this week and needed some powered up tunes to really push through some of the longer stints of work this week. Rediscovered how much I loved the Bring Me to the Horizon album That’s the Spirit. Head bang away.
What did I play this week
I fell off the daily League streak of several months recently after getting a little bored with the new season. I have been obsessed with Marvel Rivals just like half of the world’s gaming community is right now. It brought back my love for those Overwatch sessions I used to enjoy.
Vampire Survivors is on mobile now and I am fully back in blood sucker hunter mode. I love this game on PC but dropped off a year ago after “finishing” the original game. The mobile version is very well done and feels just as fun as the original.
Week in emojis
💡🚊👨💻💻🌩️🦋☕️
Weekly link
https://typ.ing/ – I am a lover, admirer, and total sucker for good marketing and ZSA’s typing game has the feel of a daily Wordle, but typing, and subtly sells you on their keyboards at the same time. Not ready to try a split keyboard yet (I have the V2 of my Nuphy Air75 on order as we speak) but I give them props for this site.