These are some notes about my working week. There are rules that I break trying to write them. This week I’ve been thinking about how to tighten up my process for developing websites and I wondered how I might tidy up all those little itchy problems that irk me on a daily basis. So I stumbled over the Pesticide...

This week I signed my first NDA and worked with the team at #######. I had a great time doing a lot of ########. Of course there might have been one or two ##### ####### but then again it could have been ###### # #######. I’m very much looking forward to this ##### and consequently ########## #### becoming a real...

These are some unedited notes about my week. There are rules. Let’s begin: Freelance work is starting to gain traction, at least according to the data I’m seeing from Cushion, a great tool for freelancers which helps me track the projects I’m currently working on. Even though it’s described as a paid beta, there’s...

This is the beginning of a new side project in which every Friday evening I’ll write for thirty minutes about what I’ve been working on over the past seven days. For a while I’ve been stashing these notes in private but I’ve finally decided to start publishing them because I want to recognise what I’ve accomplished,...

Hugh Howey on the self-publishing industry: For every high-cost producer out there getting squeezed by falling prices (which includes indies who have run up their living costs and/or operations costs), there are legions of people who have day jobs and enjoy writing in their spare time. There will always be avid...

“In love one advances by retreating.” Salman Rushdie’s musical opus, The ground beneath her feet, is one of a few select books that I want to slip into my friends’ backpacks, or hide in their bookshelf, or scatter copies under their beds until they must eventually concede. Later they’ll be reading on the train or on...

Make a note of your favourite writers. Now, read their first names aloud. Next: scan the book-jackets on your shelf, or the stream of ebooks on your Kindle, and imagine those authors standing right there in the room with you. What do all of these faces share in common? How diverse is this group of friendly...

For a while now I’ve been toying with a story. It’s a quick thought that stretched into an idea which might, maybe, perhaps, possibly turn into a BIG thing. This idea isn’t so much an elaborate story with an intricate, winding plot – nor is it a sequential tale with a standard beginning, middle and end. Instead this...

I’ve been going back through Ftrain thanks to Paul Ford’s talk at XOXO, and there’s a wondrous archive bundled up in this old site of his—years and years of journal entries. This post about his grandfather’s funeral is particularly eye-popping: Do you mind if I tell you, while I have your ear? All of this, the...

Somehow I’ve found myself in a room bustling with all the languages of Europe—they’re mixing out in the dusty air around me; Dutch and German, Greek and French, others are arguing in Romanian (or perhaps Italian) whilst they nudge past their elderly counterparts, tourists speaking English. Although they all share...

Anita Sarkeesian writing for the NYT: In 2006, I was drawn back into video games when Nintendo introduced a new system with intuitive motion controls and a quirky name, Wii. Nintendo projected the message that this new console was for everyone. Commercials featuring the tagline “Wii would like to play” showed...

Erik Kwakkel on medieval deskstops and how they were designed specifically for reading: While it is easy to find images of scribes with a desk full of books, it is less common to encounter readers in similar situations. That is to say: there are very few medieval scenes in which someone is reading but not writing –...