The life of a Viking reborn in Valhalla is exactly what you expect. Spending the day gathering wood and stone to build your home. Hunting deer and boar to feed and clothe yourself. You spend the night with friends keeping warm over a campfire. Cooking the food you gathered during the day. Fighting. Oh so much fighting. Undead draugr cursed to never rest. Dragons spitting icy blasts on the peaks of mountains. Sea serpents that rise from the depths of the ocean as you sail, just as the wind changes against your favour. These creatures are stepping stones. Preparing you for the boss fight to come. Calling a boss requires sacrifices. Summon one, and a being of devastation and destruction tears out of the ground howling for blood. Defeat them and they will impart a fraction of their power onto you. This is the life of a Viking in Valhalla. This is Valheim.

So anyway that’s where my time has gone for half of last year. But it’s a new year and I think it’s time to start this newsletter again.

ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

I've realised I'm not a tip man. I like tip-type newsletters, and I find them valuable. But when I wanted to share tips I started overthinking. Is the tip useful? Is it common knowledge? Should this tip actually be a blog post? I can’t say this was the sole reason I stopped sending out newsletters (see Valheim above). But it made it just that bit harder.

Doing some retrospection, I realised I want to have a more personal newsletter. One where the focus isn’t on tips. Because, again, I’m not a tip man. I want to write about the things I’m working on, what I’m thinking about, and the stuff that inspires me. I'm still workshopping the format, but that's what I've got so far! The topics will still mainly be around development, writing and design since that’s what I’m interested in. But probably not focused on tips.

I’ll also be changing the cadence to every two weeks. And switching from Beehiiv to Buttondown. No knock on Beehiiv, I just feel Buttondown features align more with what I care about.

Summary of changes:

• Newsletter will be sent every two weeks

• Format will be changing

• Moving from Beehiiv to Button down

I totally get changing newsletter format is jarring. And it might not be what you signed up for. If this doesn't interest you, no hard feelings! You can unsubscribe here.

With that out of the way, let's get to this week's newsletter!

things I wrote

I've been using Ghost CMS to make publishing as convenient and easy as possible. Could I have used my time to publish more posts instead of migrating to Ghost? Probably. Did I create work for myself and get some writing out of it? Most definitely.

Here's how I load Ghost CMS posts with Astro Content Collections. And how I'm using Val.town as a webhook middleware to optimise Netlify builds.

I also had some time to reflect at the end of the year and wrote about my year in general and building a developer experience team:

• Lessons I learnt from my first year of building a DevEx Team

• My year in review

stuff that inspired me

The opening to this newsletter was partly inspired by Declan Chidlow (aka Vale Rocks) article about Experiencing Zen in the Ratz Instagib Meat Grinder. It’s a fun read if you want a break from technical topics!

I've also been obsessed with leaflet.pub markdown editor. It looks nice on mobile, it’s clean and minimal. And how cute are the icons! The house icon even has some smoke coming out of the chimney. Adorable!

It’s rare to see unique icons these days. Especially, icons with this much detail. And the font Quattro fits the themes quite well, don’t you think? If you’re wondering, the font is free with attribution from IAWriter.

That's all for this newsletter. Thank you for reading and sticking around. Oh and if you want to play Valheim together, hit me up. Until next time!

Jono