Release bundles reburied
The release bundle idea did not age well. It may be the right idea somewhere down the road, but this past week and a half it stifled my projects more than it helped. Putting it on the backburner for now.
Blog
Links #36
- Hillel Wayne’s series on whether software engineering is really engineering — loved this; it’s something I’ve thought about often, and I love reading about other engineering fields
- Hillel Wayne again, on the real history behind Vim’s use of hjkl — the history of computing is endlessly fascinating to me
- Melanie Richards on sticky CSS Grid items — good writeup
- Peter Voth’s art — delicious, and by the way I hope at some point to start doing this kind of art
- Jeremy Mikkola on writing readable code — some good ideas here
Release bundles reborn
Starting now, I’m going to batch releases of my art/writing/etc., posting things only at the beginning of each month. I did this back in 2014–2015 for four or five months, and I think it’s a good fit for me again.
Arbitrary reasons for doing it (acknowledging that it would be just as easy to argue convincingly in the other direction):
- To focus more. By not thinking as often about posting work (speaking mainly of art here since that’s primarily what I’ve been doing lately), I’ll hopefully be able to focus more on the work itself and less on its reception.
- To slow down. Being able to release finished work immediately is a magical and wonderful part of the Internet, but I think some detachment can be helpful, giving ample time to assess and reassess the work and to polish it further before finally posting it. (I have regrets. Not many, but I do have some.)
- I don’t know that batching will actually make this happen, but: to work more on somewhat larger projects that take more time. My current working theory, however, is that immediate release cycles encourage me to optimize toward projects I can finish as quickly as possible. The experiment is to see if slowing the release cycle down makes an actual difference there or not. It may not. I may just be lazy and ill-suited for large projects.
- To write more blog posts that aren’t just release posts. Or, failing that, to at least make the blog feel less like a neverending train of releases and navel-gazing meta posts. (I do believe I’m yearning for the old days, when I wrote “real” posts. We’ll see if the essayist in me still lives.)
Rules I’m arbitrarily giving myself in this experiment, and other tacked-on miscellaneous thoughts that I didn’t want to start a new list for:
- I’ll post each bundle on the first day of each month, or the second day if the first is a Sunday. (I’m calling these batches “release bundles,” by the way.)
- A project has to have been finished for at least a week before I can release it — so anything finished during the last week of the month will go out a month later.
- There’s no set end date for now. If it works well, I’ll hopefully keep doing it for a long time. If it inhibits the old creativity, I’ll stop.
- I’m not sure yet whether I’ll write about in-progress projects during the month. Lately I’ve found myself harboring some misgivings about working in public, or at least some parts of it, and I need to soul search and figure out what I’m comfortable with and what makes the most sense for me and my introvert self.
Here we go. Next releases will be on March 1.
New artwork: Heart, Might, Mind, and Strength. This is the first piece I’ve painted in Procreate with my new iPad Air and Apple Pencil. Also of note, I used one or two brushes from Matthew Baldwin’s oil masterset. And a touch of chromatic aberration and lens distortion in Affinity Photo.
My last day at BYU was this past Friday. It’s still a bit surreal — for a very long time I thought I would retire there — but moving on was the right thing, and this was the right time. (The new job, should you be curious, is a software engineering position at OODA Health, and my first day is this very day. I’m looking forward to it.)
New artwork: How Great Is His Joy.
New artwork: Already to Harvest.
New artwork: It Shall Be Opened unto You.
I’ve decided to ditch Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps — Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator, mainly. I never thought I’d say that, but they’re too expensive. Instead, I’ll be using Affinity Photo, Affinity Publisher, and Affinity Designer. It’s a fairly small one-time cost instead of a dreary, never-ending, money-sucking subscription.
(If/when I need to do motion graphics or video editing in place of After Effects and Premiere, by the way, I’m planning to use the free version of DaVinci Resolve.)
So far I’ve only actually used Affinity Photo, to texture the piece I released yesterday. Worked like a charm. The live split-screen preview when applying a filter is brilliant, and the file sizes are much smaller, too. (In Photoshop I’d regularly end up with a 1–2 GB PSB file. With Affinity Photo, it’s closer to 300 MB.)
As far as typesetting goes, I still expect to use TeX (Tectonic) on projects where it makes sense — it’s what I used on the wide margin study editions since typesetting each language individually would have taken much more time — but it’s nice to have Affinity Publisher for other projects. I’m planning to use it for the book of narrative poems I’m (slowly) working on. (I’ll be setting it with Hinte, a new typeface I’m designing in FontForge. More on that soon.)
With Figma doing most of what I used to use Illustrator for, I don’t expect to use Affinity Designer all that much initially. But the raster brush textures are intriguing. We’ll see.
New artwork: In Every Thought.