My 2010s review summary: book writing, e-learning, WorldSkills and family
Makzan’s Dispatch 2019 week 50.
This is the last month of the 2010s. Let me take some time to round up my 2010s.
Highlights of my last 10 years.
Began my book writing
e-Learning and MakClass
Building my own productivity and knowledge system.
Coming back to WorldSkills skill 17
Got married and built my lovely family
I will go through them in details in coming weeks. Here is the summary.
On book writing
10 years ago I wrote my first book. Later on, I wrote several books about HTML5. I don’t call it success. I failed to publish more books in recent years. I’m now writing the CSS3 Effects book which I started the project in 2018 and paused after my 2nd son was born last summer. Writing more is one of my biggest goal in the next decade.
On e-Learning and MakClass
I taught a lot in the last 10 years. I created my own online teaching and learning system to support the teaching. The system allows me to create private and public classrooms to group students together for learning material and quizzes and workbooks. The system also benefits my students so that they can review the materials at home. In conclusion, it works well but there are plenty of improvements waiting for my implementation.
On productivity and knowledge system
None of the existing software or services fit my needs. Not Evernote, Apple Notes, Google Keep, OneNote, Bear, Notion. The closer one is a physical journal with a mix of Bullet Journal system and daily Eat that frog + time block approach. I built my own system and iterate the system eight times. There are many lessons learnt along the building journey.
On WorldSkills
I was competitor in Web Design skill at 2003 and I came back to this skill-17 family as expert since 2009. This became my life changing event for the past 10 years. I also look forward the coming 10 years of web technologies.
On Family
Getting married and having 2 sons is another life changing moment. It is roles changing and the responsibility forces me to grow. It is like I finally grow up from a small boy at 30 year-old.
Links worth sharing
Chrome and Firefox get updated.
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/12/firefox-71-a-year-end-arrival/
Now the inspector comes with web socket messages inspection. The console also comes with a multi-line mode that executes the code only when you press ctrl+enter.
Gov.uk stats for the month of November
The Firefox percentage is surprisingly low.
W3C recommends CSS writing modes to support international writing modes
https://www.w3.org/2019/12/pressrelease-css-writing-modes-rec.html.en
> CSS Writing Modes Level 3 is a specification that defines CSS support for various international writing modes, including horizontal left-to-right text (such as in English or Hindi), horizontal right-to-left text (such as Hebrew or Arabic), and vertically set text (such as for Japanese or Mongolian). It also specifies how to support combinations of the above, such as bidirectional mixtures of Arabic and English text, or English or Hebrew in vertically set Asian text.
Lite Youtube embed
https://github.com/paulirish/lite-youtube-embed
A lightweight Youtube embed that claims to be 224X faster than default one.
On writing simple software
https://arewesimpleyet.org/
Apple’s new ad-target prevention works.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/12/09/the-information-ad-tracking
Quote worth sharing
“Waiting for perfect is never as smart as making progress.”—Seth Godin
Until next week,
Makzan