Over the last while it has been becoming increasingly apparent that I'm simply trying to do too much. So let's address that.
This post covers
The biggest step in getting things under control is working out what I want to be doing and I should no longer be putting time into. I've been looking at what I've been putting on the site and my youtube channel, and realising that I'm putting the wrong content up. Ie I've been focussing on the stuff I can easily make a video/post out of, rather than the stuff that is really cool. So here's what's changing
This has been an amazing tool, that has helped fill the gap as we moved from traditional/mature desktop applications to mostly working in the browser. I've gotten so much out of this, and it was a great conversation starter. It's largely continued running absolutely fine, despite me doing very little maintenance on it over the last few years. But it is aging a bit, and is very due for some love.
In the mean time, there are actually some really good alternatives now. My favourite is dark reader for chrome and chrome based browsers, which helps you really customise your viewing experience. You can also turn it on and off for individual web pages, or all at once.
TODO Link
These are where I've been developing stuff that isn't quite ready for a mainstream release. Occasionally I put someone onto one of these while we work through ideas/issues. Most of them I haven't done anything with for a couple of years or so, and the content is very obsolete. Those will slowly disappear.
Last year, the trains in my area were having a lot of difficulty. I wrote this app to quantify that. The trains improved, and ultimately this became more hassle than it was worth. As with pretty much everything here, I'll likely pick this back up if it becomes relevant again in the future.
Was it something I ate
I wrote this to look for patterns in various aspects of life, and will very likely pick it up again in the future. For now it's low on the priorities, so it's going to sit a while.
A set of scripts for backups. I never actually committed much of what I use. There's so many tools out there, it seemed silly to invest more time in this. This will likely remain as a small number of semi-related scripts rather than a co-herant product, but I may occasionally put things there when I find them useful.
This is a clone of the official SDK before it was superseeded. I haven't done anything using it in years, and the code that relied on it has been replaced a long time ago. So I'll be deleting this.
This is one of my most useful tools.
Eventually these two will merge back together. In the mean time you're welcome to continue using it, I certainly will, however I'm not going to be putting effort into trying to please other people. If I start recieving pull requests, I'll re-evaluat this decision.
The problem has never been having enough content. It's been having enough time to work on everything I want do to + record + edit + release + write a blog post.
with two purposes
So with that focus, I had a very high focus on quality, with each episode taking about 3 full-time weeks to produce, while I learnt the techniques that gave me the results in quickly/esaily/effectively. I got more efficient, and the production times came down. However I was still putting in a huge amount of time and effort into each episode. About half way through the season I re-assessed and began relaxing the editing style to a much simpler style that was much quicker to edit and much more realistic with the hardware I had available to me at the time.
Along the way I realised that I wasn't aiming at the network anymore and over time I improved my workflow, and simplified my editing style to the point that I was able to edit an episode from start to finish in approximately twice the run time. Realistically, I'm not recording episodes often now, so I'm not that quick any more, but the workflow is still... working. ;)
Less time making it look good. More time making interesting content and getting on with other things in life.
What am I getting out of FunnyHacks
What I'm not getting out of FunnyHacks
I'm making no promises. Having content has never been an issue, time has.
I'll release when I have content + time to record + time to edit + time to write + time to post.
This is a hobby, it needs to remain fun and not stressful.
I think it's really important that we understand the technology around us. It's very easy to take things for granted, and then when they break, simply buy a new one. Yet very often, they are not hard to fix. Further, once you know how they work, even to a basic degree, you are in a much better place to be able to make them do something much more interesting.
I'm still getting value from this, hopefully you are too. So I'm definitely continuing for the foreseeable future.