Say Hi
Some months ago I started writing blog posts to a startup service I read about called Hi. Their take on blog posts are called 'moments', which start with a 'sketch' - a photo you upload tagged with the date and time (and sometimes, the weather) - to encourage you to get your ideas up there quickly. Then, when you're sitting in-front of a computer with time to spare, you expand upon those sketches to describe the full moment you wanted to write about when you took that photo in the first place.
It was a service I wanted to use before I went to San Francisco because I thought it would be a good way to document my holiday and share it with friends and family back home (I'm not an Instagram person, and am more of a writer than a hispter photographer). However, the invitation came a bit too late, so I've been slowly writing about San Francisco here when I find the time for it.
I've been spending a lot more time writing to Hi than here because that sketch thing is really the killer feature for me. Too often I find myself thinking of something I want to write about later, but when I do find the time to sit in-front of my computer to write about it, the moment is gone and I've forgotten about what it was I wanted to write - that visual reminder on Hi's sketches really helps bring my mind back to the thing I wanted to write about,
The result is that I write more, but I often feel like I'm neglecting this website in the process. In fact, I feel like I've been neglecting a lot of my side projects recently. My programming projects, especially those related to Thymeleaf, haven't been getting a lot of love for a while. And so, in the eternal cycle of going through each of my hobbies and selecting which to focus on and which to set aside for the moment, it's time for the programming stuff to take a break.
I didn't think I could get tired of programming, especially after the year I've had where so much of what made it great has ties to programming: my San Francisco holiday, speaking at SpringOne 2GX about Thymeleaf, and my long-time love of the web design/development world, coupled with a deep foray into Javascript during my HP Mobility Team days at HP, which led me to my new job as a front-end developer at Xero (a workplace which has been taking super-awesome care of me).
Yet, here I am, most of my weekend free, and the last thing I want to do is open my code editor.
I remember a friend of mine once saying when he worked at a video games retailer a long time ago, that after spending all day at a video game store, the last thing he wanted to do when he got home was play video games. It's a similar situation with me now: after spending so much time in that coding mindset during the day, the last thing I want to do when I get home, when I finally get a moment to myself, is more coding.
So instead I make progress on the list of books I've been meaning to read, clearing my queue of websites/stores/videos to visit/read/watch, and even writing some blog posts, even if they end-up on Hi instead of here.
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My Hi profile: https://hi.co/people/ultraq. Go to the Extended Moments section for the stuff I've written there so far.