After two weeks off and one week on it’s time for a super-quick retro.

The week past

So in preparation for my family vacation and upcoming paternity leave I basically ditched all of my consulting work indefinitely. What that meant was that for the first time in a long time I actually had a good amount of free, self-directed time!

Time breakdown week of October 15

In practice that meant working on place cards and thinking about my blog for the first time in a long time.

It was a mixed week overall. I started by trying to fix an odd PDF-rendering bug on Place Card Me that ultimately ended up at a dead end. Always frustrating to not be able to fix a bug in the product and waste hours.

What's a name for the feeling when your hour-long search for a problem in your app ends up at a two-year-old open github issue with 20 comments saying "any updates? also running into this..."?

Oh yeah. Despair.

— Cory Zue (@czue) October 16, 2018

Work in public, be frustrated in public.

But, after that I treated myself to some feature development under the guise of marketing work. Basically, I wanted to create a landing page for holiday place cards to try and rank for that term with the upcoming holiday season. So, I decided to build infrastructure to filter the card templates by different categories so that I’d have a place to send people. So now you can filter the templates by category and there is, e.g. a dedicated page for holiday place card templates. Once that was done I created a simple article talking about holiday place cards which I’m hoping I can get Google to notice in time for the holiday season.

On the writing front, I started two draft blogs and got neither one close to a state I was happy with. So, once again I tweeted my frustrations. The twitter-verse was super-supportive overall, so I decided the next day to just publish something I wrote a few weeks ago: Stop worrying about edge cases.

I have four partially-written blogs from the last couple months that I haven't shipped - i guess because either because my writing has gotten worse or my insecurity has gotten greater. Feeling frustrated and not sure what to do about this. Thoughts?

— Cory Zue (@czue) October 16, 2018

I hadn’t published it previously because I was nervous that I would expose Place Card Me to all sorts of abuse, and then realized that notion was silly for the same reason that the blog existed in the first place.

Looking Ahead

According to data there is a 40% chance that Ro will go into labor this week. Still feels very surreal and not at all like something we are prepared for. That said, on the work-front I’m continuing to plan to disappear at any moment and make whatever progress on personal projects I can until that happens.

Hoping to continue to work on my place cards backlog and maybe even ship some more writing.