What I Done Did in June
Lockdown was extended for another month which I’m happy about
Pivoted away from attempting to build a Miro plugin
At the end of May we had been looking to pivot reciprocal.dev towards building a Miro plugin in order to hit a mass market and validate our idea with a lot of users.
This came out of the work we’d done preparing to build an editor for creating the User Journey Maps as we realised that we could potentially skip the editor step and instead bring the core functionality from reciprocal.dev to Miro.
However after a few iterations on the plugin idea it turned out that the Miro API was too limited for our needs and we would end up having to explain those limitations to our end users which would confuse things and likely turn them off the product.
These were things like only being able to capture a sub-set of all the objects that Miro allows a user to create on a map so a user could build their User Journey Map with unsupported objects and we’d have to explain that our plugin was essentially useless to them.
Luckily the work we did building the logic for Miro was work we’d need to do for our mapping system anyways so all was not wasted.
Moved from Figma to Adobe XD
When we started looking into building a Miro plugin we used the free Figma UI toolkit that Miro provides but in doing so we hit Figma’s new lowered free-tier limits.
This put us in a bit of an awkward position as we definitely needed to create more than 9 pages for our mockups so we decided to look into how much it would cost to buy two Figma licenses.
As I already had a subscription to Adobe CC (I’m trying to get back into digital art) and that included Adobe XD we decided to pay the cost of one license for that instead (they’re about the same price) as this would prevent us from losing too much money before we’ve made a profit.
It’s likely when we do make a profit that we’ll go back to Figma as XD not being on Linux makes my workflow a little harder than I’d like.
Did my first community day in over a year
The UK’s lockdown is slowly lifting and I’ve had my first COVID jab so I decided to meet up with my mate who I used to play Pokemon Go with in the before times for a bit of a walk and catching shiny Gible.
If I’m honest I didn’t play much Pokemon Go and instead just focused on chatting but it was good to get a taste of the previous ‘normal’ again.
Finally set up awesomewm
My todo list seems to have evaporated recently so I finally had some time to spend tinkering with my Linux box.
I had seen elenapan’s amazing awesomewm themes and had sort of set it up previously but there was a bunch of functionality I hadn’t configured so I sat down for a couple of hours and hacked the .lua files in the theme into a state where I had Spotify support and the default apps were swapped out for the ones I use.
Here’s some pictures of the final setup:
Picked up Hearthstone again
In November 2020 I bought myself and my girlfriend a World of Warcraft subscription so that we could play WoW together.
We had good fun playing and got a bunch of different characters to the highest level but after a while I got a little bored of the grind as it seems after level 10 you basically end up doing the same old quests over and over again.
In the mean time as I’d installed battle.net I ended up playing a little Hearthstone again and when the WoW subscription renewal came up I decided to cancel WoW and instead focus on Hearthstone as you can play that for free.
Hearthstone has a new mode that I’m really enjoying too called ‘Battlegrounds’ which is an 8 player mode where each player builds a board presence from a limited pool of cards.
I like the Battlegrounds mode as I don’t need to have the cards to play them which as a player returning from a multi-year hiatus I’ve found it a little hard to keep up with the current meta.
I also like that Battlegrounds has some ridiculous cards that work well with combos. In Magic the Gathering psychographic terms I’m very much a Johnny (I’m really into Milling and have a ‘fun’ combo deck) but in Hearthstone I’m more on the Timmy side and love big numbers and as many murlocs as I can put in a deck.
