Summer Mornings
I've always tended to need only about six hours of sleep and I'm a fairly broken sleeper - I wake many times in the night and turn over. I do sometimes feel the benefit of getting a good eight hours, but can quite happily get by with less.
This pattern is exacerbated in the summer months. As the days get longer and the light evenings and - particularly - mornings draw out, I find I can't sleep as long as I can in the darker months of winter. If I wake at 5am, like I did this morning, then I struggle to go back to sleep and find myself getting up and wishing to use the time productively.
Often, this finds me sitting at my desk and working on whatever coding project I'm currently thinking about - or watching YouTube!
Productivity
This month's project is to try and make a Facebook Advert Generator, following a suggestion from Richard at DW Cars. It's surprising just how much benefit can be gained from a consistent approach to any online advertising - identity and consistency are vitally important here. You need to engage your audience and then become recognisable with each new view.
What I'm trying to do with this simple app is to help with that consistency by providing a template-based framework within which adverts that are as similar as possible in look and feel can be created very quickly with minimal input or effort.
I find that, working for a couple of hours - maybe between 6 and 8 in the morning - I can get a lot of work done in that short and otherwise wasted period between sleep and going out to work. These days I'm not the sort of coder who can spend ten hours of concentrated effort on a task, so a couple of hours at the most now seems to suit me well.
I'm not going to charge for this once it is done. I'll revisit it when it is complete and include a download link to the app and the manual when it's production ready. That will be a few days away at least - I still have to implement the splash objects and photo effect options yet and then decide how to handle PDF output for exporting to other media.