Q1 2025 quarterly reflection

I’ve been doing a lot of code creation with AI this quarter, in a sort of structured vibe-coding way. I love it!

This is James / reflecting

One of my objectives for last quarter was to make a process to be able to easily create short spoken video content, and I said I would include a short video in my next quarterly report, so objective achieved!

In the second half of last year I started a new habit — doing a quarterly reflection. This is the third, there are the earlier two:

• Q3 2024 quarterly reflection
• Q4 2024 quarterly reflection

In the Q3 24 reflection I started by pointing out that I had no public visibility on my professional work, and that is still the case three quarters later. I have created a lot of stuff to show, but perhaps not the right stuff. That’s something I really need to change. On the other hand, I have done a lot of things that make it a lot easier to share stuff. I’ve developed techniques and processes that make it fairly quick and efficient for me to share things that I’ve done. There are the processes that make this website for example, and allow me to easily maintain other sites like my professional site, and my personal Code Lab where I can share experiments I have done.

My new AI Builders group

This animation was made with an animation tool I coded with the help of Claude 3.7 Sonnet

I decided to close down the Information Visualization group I set up in Q3 24. It wasn’t entirely aligned with my objectives, which I guess have changed a bit as the importance of AI has grown. I have now set up a smaller AI Builders group, the intent of which is to be a group of people actually doing stuff, rather than just talking about it. I’m feeling really good about this group, I think we are going to do great things. Our second meeting is next week.

Animation tools build with Claude

The AI Builders website home page contains an animation which I generated with some animation tools I have created myself, which you can read about here: Creating animation process toolset with generative AI – The website of James Johnson. Here’s a more complex animation I created with the tools:

Month notes are developing

One of the changes I made last year was to start keeping “week notes”, which then changed into “month notes” because I thought creating a new note each week was unnecessary. This habit is where I would keep a note file open on my desktop all day and make notes into it, on all kinds of random things:

• Stuff I need to do.
• Ideas I’ve had.
• Things I’ve come across I don’t want to forget.
• Random thoughts.

I have kept this habit up, as I think it is a useful one. If I don’t do this I tend to keep notes very erratically on bits of paper, in VS Code, in Apple Notes, etc., so having a specific process is good. The only problem I’ve found is that I don’t process the notes later, so I just end up with a bunch of notes I never look at. I have processed some months, but I’ve found it quite time consuming to do. So I’ve had an idea — I am changing the process a little to make the notes a bit more structured, and I’m going to write scripts to automatically process the notes. I am still working on the spec. for this, but I think it could potentially be a great change to my productivity processes.

Drawing and reading

I wanted to draw more on my morning commute, and I haven’t really been doing that very much (although I did do the drawings for the animations I’ve done). Also I haven’t done reviews of some of the books I’ve written. Does that matter? Probably not. It’s partly a reflection of the fact that I’ve been really into coding with AI, and I’ve done a lot of that, and that’s a good thing to be doing at the moment. But I have a few book reviews pending to write up:

• Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
• Dante’s Divine Comedy (The Great Courses) by Ronald B. Herzman and William R. Cook
• The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve by Stephen Greenblatt

Meetups

I wrote and gave two talks during Q1 25, both related to the theme of Satan. Satan is a great theme I think, as it is a thread running through so much great literature and art.

• Adam and Eve and Satan
• Hell and Satan in the Middle Ages

I have a third Satan themed talk coming up—Paradise Lost and Satan.

Exercise

I’ve kept up running with the dogs at the weekend, and doing body-weight exercises three days a week. It took me a while to get back into it at the start of the year—I didn’t start until 22 January— but that was partly because I had a seasonal cold. The important thing is that I did start again. I had made changes to the exercises I’m doing to make them require more strength.

The little app I made is working well, keeping the graph of my exercise automatically updated:

// Load the CSV file
d3.csv("/data/daily_exercise.csv", d3.autoType).then(data => {
  // Transform data to calculate the average for each exercise and date
  const averagedData = d3.rollup(
    data.flatMap(d => [
      { Date: d.Date, Exercise: d.Exercise, Value: d.Rep1, Notes: d.Notes },
      { Date: d.Date, Exercise: d.Exercise, Value: d.Rep2, Notes: d.Notes },
      { Date: d.Date, Exercise: d.Exercise, Value: d.Rep3, Notes: d.Notes },
    ]),
    v => ({
      meanValue: d3.mean(v, d => d.Value), 
      notes: v[0].Notes // Assume the same note applies to all points on the same date for an exercise
    }),
    d => d.Date, // Group by date
    d => d.Exercise // Further group by exercise
  );

  // Convert the nested rollup data back into a flat array
  const plotData = Array.from(averagedData, ([Date, exercises]) =>
    Array.from(exercises, ([Exercise, { meanValue, notes }]) => ({
      Date,
      Exercise,
      Value: meanValue,
      Notes: notes
    }))
  ).flat();

  // Create the plot
  return Plot.plot({
    marks: [
      Plot.line(
        plotData,
        {
          x: "Date",
          y: "Value",
          stroke: "Exercise", // Different line for each exercise
          title: d => `${d.Exercise}: ${d.Value.toFixed(2)}`, // Tooltip with average value
        }
      ),
      Plot.dot(plotData, { x: "Date", y: "Value", stroke: "Exercise" }),
      Plot.text(
        plotData.filter(d => d.Notes), // Filter points that have notes
        {
          x: "Date",
          y: "Value",
          text: "Notes", // Display the note text
          dy: -10, // Offset the text slightly above the point
          fill: "black", // Text color
        }
      ),
    ],
    x: {
      label: "Date",
      tickFormat: "%Y-%m-%d",
    },
    y: {
      label: "Average Repetitions",
      grid: true,
    },
    color: {
      scheme: "category10", // Use a color scheme for exercises
      legend: true,
    },
    height: 400,
    width: 785,
    style: {
      background: "none", // Transparent background
    }
  });
});

Linked-in profile

One of my goals for last quarter was to update my Linked-In profile. I still haven’t done it.

Goals for this quarter

So now for the important bit—what are my goals for the coming quarter?

Carried over from last quarter:

• Do a great information/data visualization.
• Update my Linked-in profile.

New goals:

• Create an explanatory video about how generative AI works.
• Create a method to put my slides and notes from my meetup talks online.