February roundup
This month didn’t really go as I planned. I haven’t had the time for the experiments I wanted to try out. But I don’t like to beat myself up just because of that. There’s been some high points as well.
Podcasts
I’ve been listening to a ton of podcasts this month. Last month I was very much into [Blinkist] and used to listen to a book while being out walking. This month I’ve switched back to podcasts and started listening to CodePen Radio. They had a great episode of what it means to be a remote team, something I can relate to very much since I do all my work remote. Imaginary Worlds is a beautiful podcast about everything from Star Wars to zombies to Wonder Woman, a very nice way to relax and get some insights from something completely non work related. Jen Simmons had a couple of really nice episodes touching on topics related to my industry and I highly recommend listening to Standing on Turtles, it’s just amazing.
A couple of my favorite podcasts at the time
Traveling
Finally, I got to leave the country again (even if just for a couple of days). The trip went to Edinburgh and it was a lovely, lovely city. The architecture is just remarkable and I felt the scenery was a bit like taken from a Harry Potter movie. I would love to come back again in summertime for a longer hiking tour in the highlands. The trip was definitely the high point of February.
Experiments
Unfortunately, I never had the time over to delve deep into the new techniques for CSS layout. But I did buy Get Ready for CSS Grid Layout by Rachel Andrew and could play around with it briefly. Layout in CSS has been pretty much the same for the last couple of years so it was exciting to try Grid Layout which is a completely different approach than just using floats. It’s a bit like using tables again. Just that it is semantic and you can change the source order as you want with CSS only. When this is ready, it will completely revolutionize the way layout is handled for the web. Finally a clean, hack free method of creating dynamic layouts.
Reading
The main part of the month I spent reading All the Light We Cannot See which was the topic for this month’s book club meeting. I thought it was really beautiful.
Ideas for next month
I will try and learn a bit from how things went this month. I had a lot of work on my plate and next month there will be even more. Therefore I will not set up any specific goals for March. I will kind of take it as it comes instead, that’ll be cool as well.