Freelance writers send a lot of emails. There’s the usual back-and-forth with editors, arranging interviews, sending questions to sources, and most importantly the constant churn of looking for the next job. It’s easy, if you’re not careful, to lose track of your pitches among all this inbox clutter. But if…

I’ve started using Obsidian to organise my notes. For a few years now, while I’ve been building up my career as a beer writer, I’ve gathered all sorts of research: I’ve clipped web pages, marked extracts in books, transcribed hours upon hours of interviews with fascinating people, filled books with…

Imagine. You’ve got your hands on a beer at last. It’s been a long day. You’re tired, and you’re thirsty. There’s nothing you want more than to enjoy those first satisfying swallows of beer. But as you lift the glass to your mouth, what’s…

If you chill your beer too much it won’t taste of anything. If you drink it too warm, it won’t be at its best either. Here’s a quick version of my guide to recommended serving temperatures.

When I last posted some six or seven months ago I was just taking my first steps with Python, having moved on from shell scripting in bash. …

Towards the end of last month I wrote a post about how I wanted to come up with something that would reformat a log file for me into a more readable format. It’s taken a while, but today I have that solution. I moved on from shell scripts to python, and on the way to figuring out my solution I learned about git and version control, about logging and debugging, about opening and working with files, control flow, concatenation… all sorts of good stuff.

I don’t work in IT, I work in book publishing. Nevertheless, I’m finding more and more that automating tasks can have real benefits for my job so I’m teaching myself to code. Sort of. My approach has been slightly haphazard, to be honest, dictated mainly by what I need to…