What I done did in April 2022
I finally emerged from my Covid bunker to go see family
Went down to London for the first time in 2 years
There was a four bank holiday in April that happened to coincide with my girlfriend’s birthday during which she wanted to go down to London and suggested that I go with so we can both see family. I wasn’t too big on the idea of going when everyone else would have had the same idea so we agreed to go a couple of weeks earlier to avoid the rush.
It was a good trip and I got to meet my niece who was born during Lockdown as well as catch up with some people although I wasn’t able to catch up with everyone that I’d hoped to.
Completed Pencil Pirates
For my birthday in January I signed up for the first cohort of Pencil Pirates which started in late March. Unfortunately I was unable to really get the most out of the experience as I was busy whenever there was events but I was still able to follow the course after all the parts were published.
Because I’d started the course after all of the parts were available I was able to sink a couple of days into it to learn everything in one sitting instead of having the content split across multiple weeks.
I’m going to be doing a write up of what I learned and my overall opinion of the course in the next coming weeks.
Launched Clime homepage
While I’m still working on Reciprocal.dev my mind is full of ways to improve the development experience and one of those ideas was nagging away at me so much I had to take some action on it.
That idea became Clime — a tool for reconnecting the product information that gets siloed away in your analysis, design, development, testing and support tools.
To validate the idea I wanted to take a different approach than I taken previously and focus on building the landing page that explains the idea before working on building something people could use.
To do this I ran some user tests on Maze that allowed me to iterate over the landing page and understand what made it easier to for people to see the value in the product.
If you’re interested in the way I iterated over the different designs and the feedback I received I did a write-up of this experience .
Got Clime Proof of Concept built
After building the landing page for Clime I also decided to build a very basic proof of concept to understand how to build Clime should enough people want to use it.
This proof of concept involved building a GraphQL API over the Neo4J database I was using to build up the product knowledge graph and building a simple Figma plugin that could use the API to add data and run queries.
Played Kirby and the Forgotten Land
Over the aforementioned four day bank holiday we had I bought the new Kirby game and really enjoyed playing it. I’ve not got massively far due to work commitments but when I have some spare time I jump into a level or two.
I really enjoyed the different ‘real world objects’ that Kirby could interact with and how those shook up the game play. I think the only flaw I could find with it was the linearity of the level design as I thought this was an ‘open world’ game but I still find it enjoyable to look past this.
Had my first monthly entrepreneur meetup
A friend of mine who I talk to about music and business with suggested that we started a monthly entrepreneur call where we could share our successes and struggles with each other and set ourselves goals for growing our businesses.
The first session was really enjoyable and it really reminded me of the importance of running the business side of my side hustle(s) instead of just focusing on the more product development aspects.
My goals for the month are to get Clime to 10 sign-ups for the mailing list and to try and secure a company that is interested in using Clime during it’s development stage.
Got my micro dark amp
I bought myself a little treat recently — an Orange Micro Dark guitar amp head and cab. Previously I’d been using Logic Pro to simulate an amp and while this was OK enough there’s nothing like a real amp.
The head is really small but ridiculously powerful. It’s about the size of two Boss compact guitar pedals and it’s so loud that I can barely turn the volume past 1.
I’m hoping to add the head into my recording kit so that I can record clean guitar into Logic and then re-amp through my HM-2 and Left Hand Path pedals into the Amp and then use either the cab sim headphone output or record the cab itself (but I’ll need another mic for that).
