Week Notes 14

— 3 minute read

I finished doing guest lecturing at the local University this week and I’m relieved that it’s over. Although I got 3 hours a week of public speaking practice and really good feedback from students, I found the bureaucracy and academia exhausting. It was also a really unproductive, weekly time-sink.

I won’t ever get into "formal" education in the future. That’s for sure.


I’m also coming to the end of this massive project that I’ve been on since February. I’ve enjoyed it, but I’m bloody tired now. I’ve done back-to-back big, intense projects since November and I need some slow-down time. Because of this, I've blocked off my schedule until September. I mentioned it’d be August in previous notes but I want to redesign my website while the sun is shining, business-wise.

I think I’ll share the process of the redesign with you all as much as possible, so folks can learn stuff. I will treat myself as a proper client and do a full job with design discovery, IA and all of that jazz, so I’ll document stuff as it happens. Maybe I’ll do a journal of sorts, like Web Components Club.

I'm lucky that I have an ongoing retainer with Scott’s Bass Lessons, where I’m very gradually creating them a new design system that will continue to get rolled out to replace their old design. It’s a slow process, but I love it and should write more about it.

Having this retainer and a nice buffer will enable me to work on my own stuff and community stuff. My Patreon can hopefully help too.

I can also prepare myself for when the sun isn’t shining so much in the future. Having a new website that’s more focused towards landing me new work will be a big part of that.


I also started on Stalfos V2 this week. I didn’t really intend for Stalfos to come out of retirement, but a little proof of concept that I made, which generated utility classes with Sass made me realise that that’s what I always wanted Stalfos to be--a skeletal (S)CSS framework with handy utilities mixins and a config-driven utility class generator.

I spent some time while in meetings doing some planning, so I’ll tap away at that over the next couple of months. The main bulk of work will be documentation. It’s so important to get that aspect right so it’s as helpful as possible for folks.

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Hi 👋, I’m Andy — an educator and web designer

I produce front-end development tutorials over at Front-End Challenges Club and Piccalilli. You can sign up for updates on Piccalilli to stay up to date with its progress.

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