After just over 6 months, I’m stopping writing my daily journal entries.

Originally I was aiming to complete an entire year, and then rethink what I was going to do with it. However, it’s been about a week that I haven’t written a single entry, and surprisingly I’ve been totally fine with it. And as it’s reached the 6-month milestone, it feels like a good time to stop, have some time off, and refocus on the next thing.

Stats

Just because I can, here are a few quick stats:

• 183 total entries
• 30,579 total words
• 167 averages words per post

And some additional graphs:

What I’ve Learned

I’ve certainly learned a few things from the process though. Mainly that I like writing and especially personal logs, that I can write down quite easily, without a ton of research.

Something that made it really easy was automation, obviously. I’ve written about my automation before on the blog. First with “How I Automate My Daily Journal”, where I discussed the way I reminded myself to write, and also to generate a new file based upon a template. And also with “How I Automate Publishing Blog Posts”, where I go through how I take a markdown file and publish it to the blog.

However, even though it was relatively friction-free to write and publish journal entries to my blog, sometimes it just felt like a chore. Especially when a day was simply too boring to write about, where I was just forcing myself to write something.

What It Means for the Future

If I’m going to take anything away from this for the future of this blog, it’s that I enjoy writing about more personal experiences. So while I’m not promising anything, that’s the direction I want to go down.

I also want to combine that with some more photography of mine. I take tons of photos, and I just don’t feel that Instagram is a good place to host all of that. After trips, I’ve shared photos on the blog before, where I select a handful of my favourites, and this is the style I will most likely continue.

But in general, I want this blog to feel more like my blog. I’m steering away from generic tech review and Apple news. Because there are so many good writers covering that stuff already, and I’m fine with reading what they have to say, rather than me repeating most of what’s already out there. So hopefully I can start living up to the appropriately named “Chris Hannah” blog.

You’ll also notice that the Journal category has been moved from the top navigation menu to the sidebar.

Today was very much a continuation of yesterday at work, in that I was still pairing on the same piece of work, and we got quite a lot done.

In the most basic terms, it’s a Java Spring Boot server that has a few endpoints, and a database. I’m not exactly excited that I’m writing Java, seeing as I’m a Swift developer, but it’s something the team has been assigned to. Deadlines 🤷🏻‍♂️. However, I’m now properly writing tests, and I’m learning a lot of fundamental things that I take back to my Swift code.

In this specific piece of work, we have unit tests, integration tests, and also functional tests in the form of BDD/Gherkin scenarios. It’s interesting to see it all working together.

After work, I’ve mainly been doing house work. Things like washing up, laundry, and in general tidying up.

I did however, get a chance to look at Text Case for a bit, and I’ve started work on supporting parameters in Shortcuts actions! It will only be relatively simple, have a text input, and a text output, so hopefully I can get a build out via TestFlight soon.

I did notice one cool thing in iOS 13 beta 3 while I was doing this, and that’s that a bug that was introduced in the 1st beta, has now been fixed. It’s where in the custom icon select page, the icon images would expand past their bounds, and overlap nearly half the screen. I tried various ways to fix it when it first came up, but thank god the latest beta simply fixes it. That’s one less thing to think about.

I finally had a productive day at work for once! I was pairing with another developer, and we were finally left alone to actually get some work done for once. There was the odd thing I was needed for, but it was a nice change from yesterday.

Since finishing work, I’ve been at my girlfriends parents house. They invited us round for a BBQ and we then stayed to watch the football. Sadly USA beat England, which means I’ll be supporting The Netherlands from now on.

I also managed to write something on my blog today. Nothing major, just a realisation I’ve had about light and dark themed interfaces.

Ever since the iOS/iPadOS 13 betas have been available, I’ve been running them on my main devices. That’s down to multiple reasons, but one of the main ones was the new Dark Mode that’s now available system wide.

Before this global setting, I’ve been a big fan of dark themes for everything I use. Whether it’s a Twitter client, text editor, or Xcode.

However, recently I’ve noticed myself purposefully switching back to the Light theme. And I think it’s been down to two things.

Firstly, it’s been rather sunny here in England recently, and having a dark interface just isn’t clear enough. I’ve noticed this the most when I’m outside and catching up on Twitter. Thankfully I’m using Tweetbot as my client, so I can quickly two-finger swipe between themes, until I find a light theme where I can actually read the content.

The other reason is simple because sometimes a light interface just makes content a lot clearer. Especially because I’ve noticed a trend with some dark themes where the text is light grey with a dark grey background. Whereas the light mode alternative would feature black text on a white background. So the level of contrast suffers simply because of colour choices.

This won’t exactly be a surprising realisation for some people, but ever since I’ve had the ability to have a system wide dark mode, I’ve started to actually value the light mode more.

So it was back to work after a sunny weekend.

Today was full of discussions and meetings. It was pretty boring to be honest. Seeing as the end result of the meetings were pretty much what we were already doing.

However, Arsenal did announce their home kit for the 2019/2020 season, so I made sure I bought myself a shirt. It’s a throwback to a much earlier design, and it’s been very welcomed by the fans.

After I got home, I went out for a coffee, done some chores in the house, and now I’m sat in the garden with the cat writing this entry!

I think I can fit in some World of Warcraft now before I go to bed.

Today was a big day! We finally let the cat out of the house.

He’s been housebound for quite some time. For multiple reasons, including the few holidays we’ve been on recently, and the lack of time where myself and my girlfriend are both in the house together.

But, today we were finally both in, it was a sunny day, and in the afternoon we were having a cat flap fitted. He absolutely loved it, and it didn’t take him long to be out circling the block. Luckily he came back though.

So in the afternoon we had my girlfriends family round. Her dad fitted the cat flap, and everyone was doing some kind of work, whether it as housework or gardening.

In the evening we went to my aunts house for a big family party. And that ended up lasting until about 11 pm! So hopefully that won’t affect me tomorrow at work.

It was a very nice day today, and turns out I spent most of the day inside!

My girlfriend was at work, so I had the day to myself pretty much.

I started with some World of Warcraft and Fifa, but eventually I got around to do so some chores. I got the lawn mower out and trimmed the grass in the front garden, so that’s one thing I don’t have to worry about for another few weeks.

Seeing as it was sunny outside, I enjoyed the afternoon sun by watching Stormy’s Glastonbury set on television. It was really impressive, and I can certainly see why he was the headline act.

In the evening, I basically played more games, entertained the cat, and relaxed with some television!

Finally, it’s Friday.

After a long week, it was surprisingly a more relaxing day at work. There was a lot of discussions about things, but it was more an issue of time rather than effort. Which can be annoying sometimes, but I didn’t mind as it was a Friday.

After I got home, it was my turn to make dinner, as my girlfriend was working a super long shift. Basically all day. So I made a chilli con carne, and it was pretty tasty!

Not long after I ate that, I went out for a drink as it was a pretty good day still. It appears summer is finally arriving in England.

In the evening, I was still on my own, so I spent that time playing Fifa, and watching an episode of The Origins Podcast. It’s hosted by the theoretical physicist, Lawrence Krauss, and the first episode was with Ricky Gervais. It was a mix of intelligent conversations and humour. And it’s also the first thing that I’ve ever become subscribed to on Patreon, as it’s only $2 a month for full video access, and they tend to be over an hour long.N

I was slightly more productive today than the rest of the week. Work was okay, and I made some good progress in a new service we’re building. So that was pleasant.

When I got home, it was still sunny, and my girlfriend was cooking dinner. So I made the effort to get the lawnmower out and cut the grass in the back garden.

After dinner, we had my mum and sister round for coffee. Once they were gone, it was basically time for bed!

Today was just like yesterday. Work, home, dinner, sleep.

I desperately need the weekend to refuel.