knotnicky

2024 Featured

Making work (and life) less stressful by making better decisions - Brighton Ruby 2024 transcript

I was very happy to give this talk at Brighton Ruby in 2024. The video is linked in the post, and the transcript is in the post.

Speaking at Brighton Ruby 2024

Brighton Ruby 2024 programme I gave a talk called: Making work (and life) less stressful by making better decisions. Video and slides I'll post them when they're up. I also had the benefit of some great feedback and encouragement from Melinda Seckington, who I wholeheartedly recommend

Lead Dev Berlin 2023

Lead Dev Berlin 2023 agenda I gave a talk called: Making work (and life) less stressful by making better decisions. Video Video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxSBdOe4t2A. I also had the benefit of some great feedback and encouragement from Melinda Seckington, who I wholeheartedly recommend as

weeknotes

Quarter notes

* Ok, this is a lot harder than it seemed. Nothing ever happens! Let's readjust our expectations. * That's not true, I'm doing lots of things. I'm keeping myself and my plants alive, occasionally going for a walk with friends or trying to read

weeknotes

Weeknotes 06

* I feel like making notes about favourite films and then using the words "abide" might have made you think The Big Lebowski was my favourite film. Nope, just a stupid pop culture reference. * The freezer is still abiding. However, I’ve made the rookie error of buying food

weeknotes

Weeknotes 03-05

* Technically this is weeknotes 03-04 but I am hedging my bets (FORESHADOWING!!! Sorry...) against missing this again next weekend. * And a midweek weeknote!! What!! Bringing the standard Nicky Chaotic Good energy to weeknotes! Please enjoy. * So lol I bought a fun money amount of a GME share. Like, yesterday, I&

weeknotes

Weeknotes 02

* This is all I can think of, and think, whenever I open Twitter or read the news: * Except I don't look so pleased about it as I do in that picture. Everything is terrible. * Yes, I am still playing Animal Crossing. I have recently done myself a massive

weeknotes

Weeknotes 01

* I also love bandwagons! I'm a good joiner! I have always very much enjoyed reading Nat [https://natbuckley.co.uk], Alice [https://alicebartlett.co.uk], Tom [https://tomstu.art/weeknotes-52-dead-calm], Chris [https://chriszetter.com] (when he did them), Simon [https://www.minor9th.com], Chris [https://blog.chrislowis.co.

Email newsletters I have known and loved

I found this brilliant post of the newsletters I couldn't live without [https://medium.com/theres-method-in-the-madness/30-newsletters-i-couldnt-live-without-540cb6f4692] by Gemma Milne and it reminded me that my own post on this topic has been in my drafts folder for ages. I read some of the links from these on

Tower defends

I love tower defence games. Love 'em! There's something about the game that appeals to the villain in me who just wants to set up my dominos in a row and see if the bloons, jelly monsters or zombies can knock them down. I think it'

Learning programming (!) by making games with Unity

I've started a Udemy course on making games [https://www.udemy.com/unitycourse/] , because I have an awesome idea for a tower defense game I'd like to make, and this course has a "Plants vs Zombies [http://www.popcap.com/plants-vs-zombies-1] clone" chapter. Here

Things people don't tell you about when your cat dies

[I should warn you, I'm still pretty fucking upset about this cat. Sure, I knew it would happen eventually, and eventually I knew it would happen soon. And he was a cat, not a child or a parent or a friend! But he was a friend if a

There's probably a good reason that Mod Podge rhymes with hodge-podge

Thanks to my good friend Zara's suggestion, I'm trying to decoupage a random cheap MDF bookcase before I try to make the actual coffee table I want in my house. Here are some tips to remind myself (and maybe you) how not to do it next

thingsididwheniwasn'there

Things I did when I wasn't here #2*

Cor, finally made something else happen! The Starting Out publication on Medium [https://medium.com/starting-out] is a collection of articles with the idea to help young people find out about what their career might look like. I wrote a post for them about questions for developers to ask potential

Team LRB Tube Map #2

I wrote about the LRB hack day over here [https://www.knotnicky.com/london-review-of-books-hack-day-2/], including all the other hacks, but I wanted to write a bit more about the project my team worked on. Alternative London Tube Maps On the day we ended up making a proof of concept of

londonreviewofbooks

#LRBhackday No. 2

The awesome team behind the London Review of Books [http://www.lrb.co.uk/] recently invited me to spend the day with them at the British Library, as an invited guest joining in at their second internal Hack Day. It was super fun to meet the people who make the

Imposter syndrome & tail -f

So I've been trying to write posts about all the cool things I've learned from all the great conferences I've been to this year. But this is what came out instead: Lots of people have written lots of excellent things about imposter syndrome over

pesto

Link Collection Zero

Since I have been a bit busy lately (and sure yeah a bit procrastinatey, lets face it), rather than finishing up any of the several million draft posts I have in here, here are some links and things I have been reading or playing lately that I think more people

ghost pro

Neat Ghost Pro publish preview trick

s/trick/hack I know the whole point of Ghost is the markdown preview window (which is AMAZING obviously) but sometimes it's nice to see how images, etc are going to come out when fully styled in your theme. In the default Caspar theme, anyway, do this: * Write

The Story 2015

It was only when I opened my notebook to start taking notes at Smashing conference this week (post coming soon!) that I realised I hadn't written up my favourite talks from The Story [http://thestory.org.uk/2015/02/] last month. They were ALL my favourite really, but

got to feed the cat

Pick Nicky

I'm starting to look for new interface development projects from the end of the month. I've thoroughly enjoyed my time freelancing at Futurelearn [http://futurelearn.com] but now the team is full of excellent developers with great plans for the future, it's time for

accessibility

Sometimes it's better to be lucky than terrified

Jamie [https://twitter.com/jgwhite] kindly asked me to give a talk on "How we made Futurelearn more accessible" at Ember London [http://emberlondon.com] last week. I used some examples from this post in the first part of the talk: The Alphabet of Accessibility [https://the-pastry-box-project.net/

elsewhere

Things I did when I wasn't here*

Happy New Year! Let's see if I can write more than three posts this year. I'm still doing front-end development at Futurelearn [http://www.futurelearn.com], which is a great place to be if you want to work on your skills other than coding - Joel

ada lovelace day

Inspiring women

On Ada Lovelace Day [http://findingada.com], let's hear it for Victoria Coren Mitchell [https://twitter.com/victoriacoren], because poker definitely counts as maths. I was blown away today reading the beautiful writing by my colleagues about women who've inspired them [https://about.futurelearn.com/blog/

recipes

Super easy chorizo stew

I am supposed to be thinking about a talk I agreed to do about technical interviewing for a Girls in Tech event, so of course I decided it is the perfect evening to write a blog post about the amazing chorizo stew I just made. I'm pretty sure