I have been a bit silent, but I have also done a lot of things

It has been a while since I sat down and wrote here on my personal blog. It is partly because between work and the never ending saga of trying to get my father's passing documented with the different Swedish government entities, but there are other reasons as well. One such reason is that I have been very tired as this spring and summer has been very difficult from a pollen perspective. All of these things combined has meant that I have a lot less energy than I usually have.

Despite that, however, I am still working behind the scenes, and I am moving forward with planning and structure as well as building things here and there. I have also made some decisions regarding the tooling I am using on a daily basis. I have been struggling a bit ever since I made the decision at the beginning of this year to completely separate work from private life, but lately I have made some changes, and it feels pretty good right now.

One thing that was feeling weird was email, where I was planning to use Outlook. The Outlook app however is not something I like very much and after going back and forth I stepped back to Google Workspaces and Gmail. While not the absolutely best email experience, it works and most importantly it works on both desktop and mobile for me. I obviously have connected Gmail to my Atlassian platform to connect emails with activities in Jira.

Speaking of Jira, I recently took the decision to step up my usage of Atlassian products, so I have upgraded both Jira and Confluence to Premium. While there is a cost related to this obviously I feel that it is worth the cost. This is partly because I have moved the text from my book to Confluence, but I also find that I have a lot of use for both Confluence and Jira as part of planning things in my life.

I am still debating if I should invest in Jira Service Management as well, but the price tag is 3 times that of both Jira and Confluence, so I am not sure if I want to make such an investment at this time. With all the costs I am accumulating now with various tools, I'll hold off for a bit longer while I ponder how to proceed. I am obviously using Jira Product Discovery, and I am experimenting to see how to best it for both content creation and website development.

Speaking of the website, I am working behind the scene on the Atlassian section of the site. It is going well, and I am slowly building up the components so I can start building the many new pages. The concept is simple and that is that I initially will make pages for each product (or app) and collection and provide both information on the app itself and connect to different resources.

Speaking of resources, I am reviewing the many databases I have built over the years and I will delete most of them as they are obsolete. Some of them are currently hidden, and I will leave them as such until I feel it is time to focus on them again. The cleaning itself will probably take several years, so I am in no rush to focus on new things right now. Instead, I will focus on creating content and promotion for the website itself.

One fun thing I have found is that I can have a lot of fun using AI to help with code examples when I get stuck on something. It is surprising how well some AIs can generate examples based on Invision Community and PHP. I was not expecting that, and it has been quite useful in some situations when the code is not working as I think it should. After trying a few, I have decided to focus on Microsoft 365 Co-pilot for now, as I like the output and the fact that it is included in the family package I am already paying for.

My main focus right now however is to get my book the Advanced Atlassian Administration guidebook, or A3 for short. As mentioned, I am moving the raw text to Confluence and I have invited a few people to help me by reviewing the content. I am having a great time connecting the Atlassian apps to this process, and I am going to add a few marketplace apps this weekend just as icing on the cake. For news, I have decided to step away from the traditional route and I have set up a page on Substack. This will act as a kind of combined newsletter and blog at the same time. For my book, I am also exploring Loom as I have been struggling to set things up to make actual YouTube videos lately.

So a ton of things are happening, and I feel like I am slowly, finally getting back to myself again since my father passed away in April.