Updated January 2025

I'm currently focussed on:

• Spending time with family.
• Regaining my fitness with strength training. My diet fitness programme fell apart at the end of 2024, so I'm starting 2025 with a plan to get on track. (I still track workouts with a simple note in Obsidian)
• Continuing to practice mindfulness using Calm. Sometimes it's just for 1 minute, but I do a daily session. I can't sleep without one of Calm's Sleep Stories in the background (usually it's one of the stories narrated by Alan Sklar).
• Writing some articles again to get this blog back up and running and publishing to my email list. I'm exploring the use of Buttondown.
• Slowly learning to play the piano.
• Adopting a Mediterranean-style diet, with a focus on reducing/removing processed products and sugars. I currently use Fitbit to track health stats, and Lifesum for food tracking (it has rapid data entry, and the database of UK foods is the most complete I've found).
• Organising myself with Bullet Journaling on paper and Obsidian. I track all my tasks with Todoist (nothing beats its natural-date entry, and infinite reminder options!).
• Figuring out what to for the next 5 years in business. Plymouth Software turns 15 years old in 2025.
• … I've spent a lot of time recently using data tooling on AWS (Glue, Athena, Data Pipelines, custom-ETL etc.), and am introducing what I've learned into new data engineering services at Plymouth Software.
• Adopting subscription pricing options to complement the value pricing of my consulting and business services.
• Updating Keep Your Rails App Healthy and Rails on Docker, and new products to complement the business.
• Drinking far too much just enough 🫖 tea and ☕️ coffee.

Apps and Tools

I'm always interested to see what tools and apps people use, so have added this section as a living document of the software and tools I'm currently finding most useful:

• Obsidian for long-term notes, thoughts, tracking workouts, and journalling. I also have a vault connected to the repository for this site, and use Obsidian to write content.
• Note to Self for quick temporary notes, such as shopping lists, things I need to remember for a few hours, etc.
• Todoist for tracking any and all tasks, from taking out the bins to completing my tax returns. I also use Todoist in my business to track things like sales enquiries, content schedules, and so on. Nothing comes close to it for natural date input.
• Firefox one of the originals and best.
• 1-Password I use 1-Password for both business and personal. Other password managers are available, so please use one if you're not already!.
• VSCode for coding and plain-text editing.
• Fitbit for health, weight, and sleep tracking. I've use Fitbit for years, and whilst I have been tempted to look at other platforms, Fitbit has recently received some nice updates. Android's introduction of Health Connect has also meant it can synchronise accurately with other health tools. Fitbit's food tracking isn't good though, so I complement it with...
• Lifesum for food tracking. Lifesum is exceptional, and the recent introduction of AI to the food tracker is a game-changer. Snapping a photo of food, or quickly typing a summary of meals is so much simpler than scanning individual barcodes and manually adjusting portion sizes.
• Spotify I keep switching between Spotify and Amazon Music, but find Spotify much faster, more reliable, and has a bigger selection of pre-built playlists.
• Emma for finance tracking. Emma's integration with banks is great.
• 11ty for static sites, including this one.
• ... More to be added...

Business Enquiries

See plymouthsoftware.com for details of my professional development and consulting services.

Help with your code

I genuinely enjoy helping and teaching other developers, and regularly receive questions for help with coding. To help me manage these requests as they increase in volume:

If you have a small development query, such as help with a particular piece of code, please post it on StackOverflow, and send me the link.

In this way, the whole community can benefit from - and contribute to - our learning.

For direct, one-on-one support for your code, or to discuss a larger project, I offer professional software consulting services through my business.

Why?

These are my priorities right now. With the exception of the above, I say no to everything else, including:

• recruitment/employment offers;
• business partnerships;
• equity/profit–share deals;
• marketing services;
• outsourcing my development work;
• stuff being sold over the phone;
• …and so on.

Saying "no" does not come naturally to me, but taking this approach helps me to keep focussed on priorities.

Inspired by zen habits and Derek Sivers.