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Craft & Practice

Craft & Practice #8

2025-12-31

Hello internet friends,

It’s been 43 days 50 since my last update. (I had started writing on Christmas Eve, but hadn’t finished, so New Years Eve it is!)

I’m doing more ad-hoc, lightly-structured-stream-of-thought this newsletter because it’s that time of year and—after re-reading all seven newsletter updates this year—felt like an appropriate time to do something completely different.

Context Setting

The past few fortnights’ve been spent getting started on a new project, peparing-for and partaking-in this three-month holiday season, and getting started in a career coaching cohort with Career Strategy Lab with Sarah Doody. She’s also sponsoring Throughline—an online conference by Active Voice how I’ll be kicking off the year, backing up Jen Dionosio as volunteer for her ADHD-friendly design org workshop!

Reflecting on the year

These five decadays have been full. But, they’ve full and are intentional moments in space for being present with loved ones, simply being together, and enjoying that presence.

The year’s end prompts retrospective reviews, personally. And though it’s been a really rough year by many measures & scales—rough puts it lightly—it’s been a year where I’m proud of what I’ve created as I’ve traveled through it.

I won’t go into all those details. That said, I am glad to say goodbye to 2025.

Digital Gardening

On January 1st, 2025, I published my first /link to my links blog. The initial bookmark was to Jeremy Keith’s /links blog—a direct inspiration for my own.

I first wrote about wanting to grow my digital garden back in July 2024. For having my own little corner of the internet. It’s about neuroemergent time, where there’re two primary orbital phases:

  • Getting shit done: phase with periods of intense concentration, energy, and productivity; and

  • Gathering stardust: phase of spiral orbit with periods of stillness, staring out windows, and diving down rabbit holes.

I wanted a digital garden for focused, purposeful making that I can tend to in my own time.

I started this year saying, “Fuck it. I’m going to start from scratch and do it my way.” I moved from wanting to shipping and actually doing it.

I’ll get to the data and numbers in a bit, but it’s worked out really well.

What are you proud of?

In Active Voice’s final community coaching call of the year, Sarah Wachter-Boettcher  kicked off with this question. For me, my digital garden was the first thing that came to mind—and I hold to it.

It’s been more than just the digital gardening though. Professionally, this year I:

Just going through my calendars and listing everything out has been a fun retrospective.

Most of these things were significant energy-givers, filling my cup while managing my spoons.

Taking a more active, participant and organizer role focused on more internet communities has been a great change from 2024 for me.

That year, I was out and about all the time, trying to network locally & physically but not finding genuine connection or “my people”. I still resonate with Luke Davis’ post on loneliness in blogging and online spaces:

I still don’t think I’ve necessarily “found my online people” yet. I’ve found individuals and maybe small groups of friends in small communities, connected or not, but not a slightly larger community where I feel on equal footing with others and it’s regularly active and I can jump in at any time and get a conversation going and I feel like I can relate to other people more than I usually do. Is that an impossible ideal? Probably. But I’d rather strive for that than settle for thousands of individuals shouting their hot takes around me. I should not be muting and blocking more than I follow or engage.

Digital Gardening Data

Now for the fun, geeky bits. This is where I’m really proud of what I’ve built over the year.

Rituals & Rhythms

The thing about gardening, writing, crafts, and practices: a need for consistent time and space to do the thing.

I’ve been able to establish morning rituals: wake, coffee, shower, walk dog, an hour or so of gardening, go into focused work time for the day (contract, community, company, etc).

These have had a direct and significant impact on the outcome of this year’s gardening harvest.

Structure & Numbers

I started the year with nothing. I’m finishing the year with these pages & counts:

Garden

Soil

Work

Info

In addition

I’ve learned a lot about Kirby CMS and truly enjoy working with it. Vibe coding using generative AI tools has enabled me to get a lot of things done I’ve wanted to do for a long while—and learning more about development in my own way!

None of these are necessarily “production ready” for any sort of professional scale…yet?

Bookmark Progressive Web App

To aid in gathering my links—and something I’ve wanted to do for the longest time—is have a way to share something directly to my site via my phone using the Share Dialog on Android. Once I found out PWA’s can have this functionality, I went about it and developed my /share tool.

A dark mode website form that has the title of Save Bookmark and seven fields for content: URL, title, tomain, slug, author, tags, and description. There's a Fetch metadata from URL button beneath the URL field and two buttons at the end of the form: a quick save/read later button and save bookmark button.
Screenshot of my bookmark page on my site.

I’ve even wrangled it to pull relevant metadata from the site I’m sharing from, too! So, it greatly reduces the amount of typing I need to do to get the information I want to collect.

It only works for logged in users (me), but you can take a look.

CSV Download

As my tags were getting unruly (around 2300 unique tags), I needed to find a way to normalize, categorize, and make sense of what sort of content I have gathered.

I vibe coded a small tool for Kirby to export a .csv that I can download, manipulate in Google Sheets, then re-upload—bulk updating all the tags!

It’s led to developing thematic groupings of all the content I’ve collected & created over there, emerging from the data itself!

Contrast Checker

A screenshot of color contrast matrix where, on the left, users can input teh colors, see a satch, adjust the Lightness, chroma, and hue of each color using a slider. The contrast matrix on the right shows those colors and how they relate to each other for compliant color pairings.
A screenshot of my Contrast Checker tool, available to play around with at jonathanstephens.us/play/contrast-checker

With all this identity and design system work, I needed a tool to help me with color palette refinement. I’ve worked on a few color tools, but this was one that’s really helped me out and I use it frequently.

Flywheel Generator

A very white screenshot with four circles connected in the center (Aquicition, Activation, Retention, Monetization) as a flywheel. There's a UI frame that has various tools and outlines to create and manipulate the flywheel.
A screenshot of a vibe coded flywheel generator, ready to play around with at https://jonathanstephens.us/play/flywheel

For near a decade now I’ve wanted to build a “Flywheel Generator” but could never figure out how. Vibe coding helped me here and I was able to get one in a working manner that helped me collaborate & communicate with clients during multiple projects!

Commits & Code

A calendar made of squares with each day of the year a different color. If it's black, no commits were pushed to Github that day. The colors here are mostly light green across the whole year, and getting to be darker green with more commits through August and November. It reads "698 contributions in the last year" to my website.
Screenshot of my commit graph on Github at https://github.com/jonathan-stephens

One of the fun aspects of all of this was also the building out the code from the start. I have plans to refactor, and have refactored things already as I’ve worked.

My commit graph has never looked so colorful.

It’s also cool that I’ve found a website that makes videos of git commit trees and such.

In closing

It’s been a rough year. But, it’s also been good in many other ways.

Back to Sara’s opening question from the coaching call before holiday’s swung into gear:

I’m proud of all these things I’ve created, written, and cobbled together.

It’s been a year of making things and building things, and my digital garden brings me energy. It’s also building on my own knowledge base, leaving evidence of the work, and continuing to grow.

I’ll leave the “where I want to take my garden” post for 2026.

Now, I’ve been a long time writing and it’s time to start getting things ready for celebrations this evening!

And naps.

Especially if planning to make it to midnight to welcome in the new year.

Lastly

Thank you all for following on this journey. There’s 15 of y’all subscribed and I’m thankful for that. I hope the sharings over the past year’s newsletters have brought some interesting things and learnings.

Planning to continue to build this practice of Craft & Practice.

Hope y’all will stick around with me.

With love well-wishes into the new year—be safe; & take care,

Jonathan

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