It’s a truth, universally acknowledged, that a person raised on the web must be in want of a blog. Unfortunately, the regular upkeep of a blog is nigh-impossible in the attention economy. The general blog format also appears to have transitioned from personal tell-all to how-to guide of sorts, at least in the tech industry. Having left my teen years far behind, it’s a struggle to lay myself bare on the Internet; also, having an 8-5 job doesn’t leave much time for the kinds of side projects which may result in any kind of how-to document. For the things I know how to do well, there is someone on YouTube who is a professional and can explain it much better. One thing I do have to offer: in nearly any word processing app (on the Mac), if you highlight a phrase and hit CMD + K, it will let you enter a hyperlink.
Many things have transpired since I last made an entry here, including but not limited to:
- Learned Tableau (Public, Desktop, and Prep)
- Did a lot of deep thinking about my HCI school background and how hard it is to apply if 1. you’re somewhat out of practice due to changing interests and 2. one doesn’t have seniors who are also trained in this field. Cue a lot of frantic googling of “best practices for ___”. I might even say that mentorship is really important for skills development. I’ve done a lot of thinking in general about the skills I picked up over the years that I got really good at due to hyperfocus, and then let fall by the wayside.
- Read a lot more books than I did last year (I think)—at least, I started a lot more books. Planning on doing some personal data digging and possibly visualization because I love both dataviz and books. Blog post possibly forthcoming toward the end of this year.
- Dug through my financial transaction history to figure out just how much I’ve spent on coffee at cafes over the past couple years. Blog post definitely forthcoming.
Retrospecting like this is making me want to live more deliberately. It’s no easy task to carve out time for learning and creativity after the work day ends and I feel brain dead, but I’m finding it harder to deny it’s essential for life satisfaction. Maybe that’ll be the new (renewed?) purpose I’ll dedicate this blog to. That, and all the tasty new keyboard shortcuts I find.
Code 680 