mattgrayisok

A few things happened this month which will hopefully have a significant effect on the progress towards my long term goals - although I'll need a certain level of flexibility with the routes used to get there.

Overview

I had my final official day working for Now Music this month. A bittersweet change as I've been working with them for nearly five years so I know their team really well, but I'm ready for a new big project.

That has neatly coincided with some ongoing conversations between myself and Jen Hingley centred around bootstrapping a transparent, full-service digital agency.

This is something that we've both wanted to try for a while now, and our deep knowledge and experience spread across the disciplines of brand, design, development and support should put us in a good position to build something great.

I also specified 'transparent'. We'd like you to share the journey with us, ups and downs. We're still ironing out the details but we're hoping this will include:

• As much open data as we're able to supply
• Live streamed design and development (where possible)
• Sharing internal documentation, process etc
• Lots of other ideas that we're still to explore

A surprise piece of work landed when The Independent Group split from the Labour party half way through the month. After seeing the site shared on Twitter I had an investigate, realised it was Craft CMS powered and that it wasn't implementing any full page caching.

I let the site's creators know that, although Craft is great, it isn't built to handle the amount of traffic they were about to receive without a hefty caching layer in front of it. They got in contact and asked if I'd be happy to lend a hand by implementing some of the things I'd written about in my Dexerto article.

I was happy to oblige and, although it took us a little while to work out the kinks, we managed to get the site working reliably under the massive load caused by almost all UK online news outlets linking to it 😬

Finally, I attended a mentor match-up event organised by Tech Manchester towards the end of the month. I had the opportunity to (briefly) speak to some very talented mentors. I'm currently waiting to see if I receive a match-up with any of them.

Working from home and being relatively introverted, my professional network isn't particularly expansive so finding people who might be willing to act in an advisory/mentor capacity organically has been difficult. I'm hoping that this opportunity will help kick start a change in that regard.

Goals

• 4 articles written and published. Pretty much back on track for this goal.
• Not too much done on Servd practically but mentor match-up should accelerate this business as a whole.
• £0 MRR from services. £8 passive from plugin sales.

Income

Bit Breakfast

• Plugin Sales: £8
• Client Projects (Invoiced excl VAT): £8,837

Reflection

In my last progress review I alluded to a potential split in my attention considering I'm still building Servd and now also thinking about kick starting an agency. I also said "I am no Elon Musk". I've since decided that the only thing getting in the way of making this work is the development of appropriate personal process for establishing and following through on a list of important tasks. Plus careful delegation.

As a bit on an aside: I'm increasingly receiving nice emails and messages from people who have read my articles. This is nice and gives me good motivation to keep on creating them. I'm probably going to run out of things to write about in the Craft/Docker niche soon though 🤣