Chris Hannah

I’ve got it into my head that I want to get some of my writing over the last few years printed into a book, as a sort of preservation mechanism.

I’m not sure how best to organise or curate it, I’m sure will become clearer once I go back through the many blog lists I’ve written.

One thing’s for sure though, ever since I watched Patrick Rhone’s talk at Micro Camp, I’ve felt like I should be finding a more permanent form of archive for my “better” pieces of writing.

I think I’ll start some initial investigation tomorrow, but I think it would be a pretty cool idea to get a personal volume printed of my favourite pieces so far. And then having a regular volume would be nice.

Although this would be primarily a self-preservation exercise, making a digital copy available to others could also be a possibility.

As part of looking into ways to improve my experience with Xcode, I came across a great talk by Stefano Mondino from Swift Heroes 2020.

The main concept behind the talk was to use various command-line tools to automate an Xcode project.

Firstly, how you can maintain an environment with things like a Makefile, Gemfile, Brewfile, etc. Then various other tools for more specific Swift/Xcode enhancements.

• XcodeGen to manage the Xcode project, dependencies, targets, to link frameworks, etc.
• SwiftGen to generate Swift code to map to project resources, such as images, colours, string, etc.
• SwiftFormat to automate reformatting Swift code to follow a certain style.
• SwiftLint to further enforce a style and conventions. (Which can be represented in Xcode as you code)

I use SwiftFormat and SwiftLint already. However, XcodeGen and SwiftGen are completely new to me. So I’ll definitely be playing around with these for a while!

One thing that has really improved my productivity recently is ambient music. And to be more specific, Harry Potter ambient music.

I wrote about ASMR Rooms and using them to immerse yourself into a single task, and on “background environments” in general, back in November last year. And it’s something I’ve slowly been using more over time.

I’m not totally sure why Harry Potter is the thing that works for me, but I assume it’s down to a few factors. It has a nostalgic effect, the music is great, and I find it to be rather relaxing. The full effect comes with the various videos you’ll find on YouTube where you’ll get a scene from the movie (or an adaptation), a mix of the music, some slight movement in the scene, and also a few atmospheric sound effects.

The best way to describe it would be that you’re immersing yourself in a distraction-free environment, where you can fully focus on a single task. What I typically do is connect my MacBook to my external monitor, and keep the MacBook screen solely for one of these videos. It seems to keep one half of my brain occupied, so I can use the other half to do something productive.

It’s something I would suggest that everyone tries, although you may find that Harry Potter isn’t right for you. I’d suggest searching “ambient music” or “ASMR room” on YouTube, and having a look through them. I’ve also found some great ones based on The Hobbit which are quite nice too.

After the hype of the finale, I decided that I would finally give WandaVision a go. I had seen some early clips and decided it wasn’t for me, but I had nothing to do today so I thought I’d binge the whole series in one go.

Without including spoilers, here are my overall thoughts of each episode:

1. Painful
2. Painful
3. Slightly less painful.
4. I think this could actually turn out to be quite interesting.
5. Interesting but weird.
6. Still weird, but I’m increasingly intrigued.
7. The weirdest so far.
8. An interesting turn of events. Things are starting to make sense. Probably the first time I became fully invested in the series.
9. What an incredible episode.

Here were my thoughts after 7 episodes:

• After the first three episodes, I was constantly questioning whether something was a joke or not
• The first episodes were dull, and I think could have been reduced to 5 minutes.
• Because the early episodes were so weird, I was on edge for the rest of the series.
• I’m not a fan of the cheesy and cheery type of show that I think it’s meant to be mimicking, so this could be a reason why it didn’t click that much with me early on.
• There are moments where I think it could get interesting, but they’re surrounded with so much filler.

But episode 8 was when it really kicked into gear. That’s when I started to find it really interesting, and I was actually gripped for once. And episode 9 was absolutely incredible. These two episodes made up for everything I found boring in the first 7.

I’m actually now excited to see where the storyline continues.