August in its entirety managed to pass us by, almost unnoticed but for the buzzing of cicadas outside our windows. It seems that that calendar wont slow down for us, but continues marking each day whether we like it or not.
But despite the month passing us at a sprint, we’ve been working hard and playing hard. My freelance projects have really picked up, so the struggle has really been in making the best use of time. With these projects come plenty of problems that need solving, and I’ve discovered that I do love to problem solve.
I’ve been learning how to ask the right questions, possibly the most useful skill in problem solving but not something I’m particularly good at. Asking the right questions to others, and asking the right questions to myself… to learn more, to discover where any gaps may lie. This works both for things that I might need to learn for work, but also for things to learn for fun. Even the things that are researched for fun projects manage to make themselves useful in ways that I wouldn’t have expected. It seems as though most of the things that I find myself doing are connected, even if only tenuously; You never know when one topic will change your perspective on some other entirely different topic.
As a result of all of this my non-fiction library, which sits on my desk beside my computer, has been slowly growing with a mixture of books on all kinds of topics. Very recently I realised that there was something very specific I would need to learn in order to solve a problem that I was having, something I’d been putting off, so the book Javascript & JQuery: Interactive Front-end Development has now pushed itself to the top of my to-read pile.
I also have 2 other books on hold at the library, one on UX design and the other on psychology. All related, yet separate.
Summer is almost over, although we’ve been threatened with a heat wave this week so perhaps it is a good time to hide out in a cool apartment bedroom with a fan and a book.
