Updated August 2024.

I'm currently focussed on:

• Time with family.
• Improving my fitness with strength training. I've set a couple of personal goals for the year that I'm tracking with a simple note in Obsidian.
• Writing some articles again to get this blog back up and running and publishing to my email list.
• 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 is approaching 15 years since launching.
• … 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.
• Continuing to value price 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.

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.