The Map is Mostly Water Office Hours are open For about 2 days. What do you need feedback or advice on, what questions do you have, what secret trouble stirs thy breast? Feel free to ask about house design, New Hampshire, philosophy, parenting, or anything else you want to discuss.
You've mentioned a couple of times how you & your wife figured out sleep differently with both your children; I'd love to hear any advice you have! Currently preparing for Baby #1's arrival in the next month.
All the illustrations are my own. I wanted the website to feel like really high quality paper, but still have life and animation. I also wanted a little bit of a storybook nostalgia, while remaining professional.
I really like the effect. Some considerations from the development side:
There are a lot of images loading and with them some redundancy. Some are also larger than they need to be (blank space). A few of them could be compressed more with OxiPNG + reduced palette (eg using https://squoosh.app/), but not too much, the ones I looked at were pretty optimized, so reducing the number of images loaded that are redundant might be the best bet there. If you're 100% set on loading 8MB of images, you can always start with the blank "paper" and have them fade in.
I think the text looks good, but (only on the first page) it starts to fade too soon, almost right in the middle of the page. That makes it a bit harder to read. On the Pricing page, on a wide monitor, some of the text is obscured by the image, and needs a background. (the part that begins "Every project has its own...")
"Our technical work is guaranteed to be bug-free forever." - I would be afraid of saying this!
I think on the About Us page, there is too large a gap between the top content and the next section. Some people might get the impression there's nothing else on the page. This is especially pronounced in medium-sized browser windows.
I think if you have any concrete examples you can talk about in Who We Serve, it might come off stronger.
Thank you for the thoughts. I have tried some image optimizing tools but you’ve reminded me that I should be able to manually reduce the palette with photoshop even further. I am set on high quality images but the colors are limited. I have a fade in effect, but your feedback tells me it needs to be stronger.
I made the pitfall of testing on every small device screen size and overlooked bigger monitors, nice catch!
The idea behind the guarantee is to offer an original LLBean-style quality guarantee. Since customers shouldn’t have to pay for work to be redone anyways, guaranteeing it offers a lot of value to the relationship. Just like LLBean expected people to return items over their lifetime guarantee, I expect and welcome some triggering of this guarantee as part of the process. It’s been working well for the several years I’ve done it.
I’ll take a look everything else you mentioned and I’m sure implementing your thoughts will make a stronger website. Thank you again!
Any book recommendations for landscaping inspiration (or do you mainly use online resources / Pinterest, if anything)? Feeling daunted by my blank slate of a yard!
I mostly use pinterest and (a tiny bit) instagram, though over time these feel like a flat circle, just recommending the same things over and over. I have a primary gardening board which is small: https://www.pinterest.com/simonsarris/hill/
Instagram is hard to "tune", I don't follow many good gardening people, but if you like and save enough photos you might get a few OK ideas in the explore tab. It isn't great, though. One I liked: https://www.instagram.com/sofiehills_tradgard
I am finding with a lot of the resources that I like only a few bits of each. There are not many gardens or IG accounts where I like everything. I think Tasha Tudor's garden remains the best example of what I think is really perfect.
For books I think its interesting to flip through Gardens Are For People, but its not worth buying. I would see if a library has it. I also checked out English Cottage Gardening for American Gardeners from the library and it was worth leafing through, also.
Feel free to email me pictures of your yard if you want to talk about it (my name at gmail)
How do you handle ticks, especially with how much time your children spend in nature? I don’t imagine you’re doing a head-to-toe tick check every night.
I mow a perimeter, and have chickens (helps a little), and scare away deer when I can, and the cat takes care of any mice near the house (they spread ticks too). But of course this is not enough! If the babies only play in short grass or near the house I often only do a very quick check before bed, just looking at their scalp really, with my phone light. If we go into the woods then before bed I give them a closer look. But its easier to search a child than yourself, it doesn't take too long.
There are almost no deer ticks here, mostly dog ticks. They are annoying, but larger and less dangerous, so easier to spot. I know it bothers some people quite a bit but I don't stress about it very much.
I really wish I could give a good answer to this, but I have been somewhat disappointed with almost everything software lately. It feels like nobody is taking the time to tighten the bolts so that it feels really cohesive. A friend was showing me some mobile card game he was playing recently, and as he's going through the UI all I could notice is that they stuffed it so full of animations (or there was simply no emphasis on optimization) that the frame rate was really poor - on my friend's powerful phone! It was kind of disheartening. It was the kind of thing you'd never see on an old video game console. It doesn't matter if the screens are flashy, they have to have an aura of effortlessness too or the spell is broken.
Yes, feel free to ask anything. Though I think for this particular question, I will be able to make a better answer if its more narrowed.
I think for very little children there should be no focus on explicit religious instruction. Instead it should come by in everything you do. We do say grace at the dinner table, and talk about prayer, but we try to keep it very simple and as natural as possible. I think if you try to "explain" anything too early, it comes across as unnatural. Instead, little rituals that build up in importance seems like the most natural thing. I hope that makes sense.
Really interested in your interactive map. Wife, kids, and I live on 16 acres. Of course have a variety of projects. Over the last 3 years, we have incrementally added a garden (roughly 300 square feet of beds) and blueberries, raspberries, blackberries. We started an orchard (planted the first 10 trees next year, eventually shooting for 30-40 of various fruit trees), and have planted a variety of native hardwood and flowering trees around the property (pecans, chestnuts, oaks, sourwoods, etc).
I have thought a lot about the best way to both plan and track this work so that I'm not constantly asking, "what variety of bluberries did we plant where?" Or "which pecan trees have yielded better over the last few years?" and other similar questions. For my day job, I (for an easy description) am a computational physicist....write code to implement various algorithms to model physical processes. So I write a lot of C++ code, and then like most good scientists, a lot of Python and Matlab. So, O wouldn't mind trying to code up something to do this. But I don't have a lot of experience writing interactive apps or good GUIs.
Have you ever explored using GIS software to plan/track things you're doing on your property? If so, thougths? Pros/cons?
For something small like our gardens, GIS feels like overkill. If I had 300 acres of orchards or something I would definitely want to start using it.
But I think using a simple top-down diagram editor overlaid over a drawing or a drone photo is better for my (possibly our) use case. In general I think one should start with the simplest thing that works for personal projects, and build it up from there. Or else you might never start. I actually started on pencil and paper, but now that its growing and I want to share it, it needs to be online too.
I like the emphasis on simplest possible. I'm sometimes guilty of "best possible." Pen and paper is my current mode....I keep doodling and re-doodling future projects, so wanting to try something that lets me edit a little bit more easily. In general, pen and paper are grossly underrated, though. My whiteboard at my office gets copious use:-)
Well, I'm not sure I have any specific advice. I mostly just wait them out. I don't do anything like bargaining or threatening, and they're still (mostly) too young to reason with. So the only thing to do is wait them out.
A follow up question if you don’t mind. Any advice on potty training? Feel like I’ve tried everything with my boy and he still only wants to go in his diaper.
The way we did it was by having him have "nappy free time" where we let him play with no clothes on (or just a shirt) and watched him like a hawk. Then see if we could determine signs. As soon as he started peeing we'd tell him "time to go to the potty" and take him there even if he was done. This was not the easiest process and waiting another 5-6 months might have made it a lot easier, but we were trying to do it earlier.
Diapers are designed to make it not-uncomfortable when you wet yourself, so if you switch to pants and underwear it may also be an improvement because they will really feel it when they do it. But it involves a lot of changing clothes for a few months to let them do it that way. If you leave them in underwear only you might notice a pee dot and thats when you take them to go.
Thanks Simon. All clear. We are doing great with pee. The problem that remains is he insists on only going poop in his diaper. He will try to go on the toilet but tells us he can't do it. So it is not for lack of trying. It's some sort of comfort thing.
What kind of potty setup do you have? We had a similar problem with the toilet but he is just fine using the BabyBjorn Smart Potty (a small ground-level potty they can get on themselves, feet on the ground)
Hi Simon. Do you have any general guidelines for a home office? Some particular questions I have: would you face the wall if you are using screens? Would you use an ergonomic chair? Thanks a lot
I have a draft post on (almost) this question. I suggest you call it a studio, not an office, and don't make it look or feel corporate. It should feel like a place of creativity and be as messy as you want,.
My desk faces a wall, though it also faces two windows to either side so I can look outside quite easily. I will take some pictures to post on twitter some time (or for the studio post).
I would use an ergonomic chair if I had one, but I don't. I think about buying one a lot but they are ugly and (the best ones) expensive. I suppose I should buy one anyway, as I have no shortage of hobbies that are hard on my back. I think if you can easily afford it, a Herman Miller sounds like a great idea. I spent a long time when covid started using a dinner chair (that I found on the side of the road) which got very painful after a few months. I upgraded to a $99 office chair, which I hate only slightly less, alas.
Maybe here you have influenced me more than I have influenced you. Time to go look at chairs...
Thank you Simon! I like the idea about how to name it. Also, the main wonder about ergonomic chairs is the fact that they remind me a lot to the corporate world; but indeed here the trade of ugliness for back health might be worthy. I'll welcome so much that post. Have a good Sunday.
Yeah the "look" of the ergonomic corporate chairs drives me crazy. I really hate it. But I have so many hobbies that are hard on my back, never mind all the sitting that I do the rest of the time, that it feels like I should make peace with them.
You've mentioned a couple of times how you & your wife figured out sleep differently with both your children; I'd love to hear any advice you have! Currently preparing for Baby #1's arrival in the next month.
Can you email me and I'll send the advice over? my name at gmail
Office hours request: I just launched my website last week—I would value your feedback as a developer, an artist, and a writer.
https://cypressconsulting.com/
All the illustrations are my own. I wanted the website to feel like really high quality paper, but still have life and animation. I also wanted a little bit of a storybook nostalgia, while remaining professional.
I really like the effect. Some considerations from the development side:
There are a lot of images loading and with them some redundancy. Some are also larger than they need to be (blank space). A few of them could be compressed more with OxiPNG + reduced palette (eg using https://squoosh.app/), but not too much, the ones I looked at were pretty optimized, so reducing the number of images loaded that are redundant might be the best bet there. If you're 100% set on loading 8MB of images, you can always start with the blank "paper" and have them fade in.
I think the text looks good, but (only on the first page) it starts to fade too soon, almost right in the middle of the page. That makes it a bit harder to read. On the Pricing page, on a wide monitor, some of the text is obscured by the image, and needs a background. (the part that begins "Every project has its own...")
"Our technical work is guaranteed to be bug-free forever." - I would be afraid of saying this!
I think on the About Us page, there is too large a gap between the top content and the next section. Some people might get the impression there's nothing else on the page. This is especially pronounced in medium-sized browser windows.
I think if you have any concrete examples you can talk about in Who We Serve, it might come off stronger.
Thank you for the thoughts. I have tried some image optimizing tools but you’ve reminded me that I should be able to manually reduce the palette with photoshop even further. I am set on high quality images but the colors are limited. I have a fade in effect, but your feedback tells me it needs to be stronger.
I made the pitfall of testing on every small device screen size and overlooked bigger monitors, nice catch!
The idea behind the guarantee is to offer an original LLBean-style quality guarantee. Since customers shouldn’t have to pay for work to be redone anyways, guaranteeing it offers a lot of value to the relationship. Just like LLBean expected people to return items over their lifetime guarantee, I expect and welcome some triggering of this guarantee as part of the process. It’s been working well for the several years I’ve done it.
I’ll take a look everything else you mentioned and I’m sure implementing your thoughts will make a stronger website. Thank you again!
Any book recommendations for landscaping inspiration (or do you mainly use online resources / Pinterest, if anything)? Feeling daunted by my blank slate of a yard!
I mostly use pinterest and (a tiny bit) instagram, though over time these feel like a flat circle, just recommending the same things over and over. I have a primary gardening board which is small: https://www.pinterest.com/simonsarris/hill/
Instagram is hard to "tune", I don't follow many good gardening people, but if you like and save enough photos you might get a few OK ideas in the explore tab. It isn't great, though. One I liked: https://www.instagram.com/sofiehills_tradgard
I am finding with a lot of the resources that I like only a few bits of each. There are not many gardens or IG accounts where I like everything. I think Tasha Tudor's garden remains the best example of what I think is really perfect.
For books I think its interesting to flip through Gardens Are For People, but its not worth buying. I would see if a library has it. I also checked out English Cottage Gardening for American Gardeners from the library and it was worth leafing through, also.
Feel free to email me pictures of your yard if you want to talk about it (my name at gmail)
How do you handle ticks, especially with how much time your children spend in nature? I don’t imagine you’re doing a head-to-toe tick check every night.
I mow a perimeter, and have chickens (helps a little), and scare away deer when I can, and the cat takes care of any mice near the house (they spread ticks too). But of course this is not enough! If the babies only play in short grass or near the house I often only do a very quick check before bed, just looking at their scalp really, with my phone light. If we go into the woods then before bed I give them a closer look. But its easier to search a child than yourself, it doesn't take too long.
There are almost no deer ticks here, mostly dog ticks. They are annoying, but larger and less dangerous, so easier to spot. I know it bothers some people quite a bit but I don't stress about it very much.
Office hours question: what is a beautiful piece of software you have recently been enjoying?
I really wish I could give a good answer to this, but I have been somewhat disappointed with almost everything software lately. It feels like nobody is taking the time to tighten the bolts so that it feels really cohesive. A friend was showing me some mobile card game he was playing recently, and as he's going through the UI all I could notice is that they stuffed it so full of animations (or there was simply no emphasis on optimization) that the frame rate was really poor - on my friend's powerful phone! It was kind of disheartening. It was the kind of thing you'd never see on an old video game console. It doesn't matter if the screens are flashy, they have to have an aura of effortlessness too or the spell is broken.
I'm not sure how an office hours differs from an AMA, so I hope this is okay to ask.
How should one think about religion and parenting?
Yes, feel free to ask anything. Though I think for this particular question, I will be able to make a better answer if its more narrowed.
I think for very little children there should be no focus on explicit religious instruction. Instead it should come by in everything you do. We do say grace at the dinner table, and talk about prayer, but we try to keep it very simple and as natural as possible. I think if you try to "explain" anything too early, it comes across as unnatural. Instead, little rituals that build up in importance seems like the most natural thing. I hope that makes sense.
Really interested in your interactive map. Wife, kids, and I live on 16 acres. Of course have a variety of projects. Over the last 3 years, we have incrementally added a garden (roughly 300 square feet of beds) and blueberries, raspberries, blackberries. We started an orchard (planted the first 10 trees next year, eventually shooting for 30-40 of various fruit trees), and have planted a variety of native hardwood and flowering trees around the property (pecans, chestnuts, oaks, sourwoods, etc).
I have thought a lot about the best way to both plan and track this work so that I'm not constantly asking, "what variety of bluberries did we plant where?" Or "which pecan trees have yielded better over the last few years?" and other similar questions. For my day job, I (for an easy description) am a computational physicist....write code to implement various algorithms to model physical processes. So I write a lot of C++ code, and then like most good scientists, a lot of Python and Matlab. So, O wouldn't mind trying to code up something to do this. But I don't have a lot of experience writing interactive apps or good GUIs.
Have you ever explored using GIS software to plan/track things you're doing on your property? If so, thougths? Pros/cons?
For something small like our gardens, GIS feels like overkill. If I had 300 acres of orchards or something I would definitely want to start using it.
But I think using a simple top-down diagram editor overlaid over a drawing or a drone photo is better for my (possibly our) use case. In general I think one should start with the simplest thing that works for personal projects, and build it up from there. Or else you might never start. I actually started on pencil and paper, but now that its growing and I want to share it, it needs to be online too.
I like the emphasis on simplest possible. I'm sometimes guilty of "best possible." Pen and paper is my current mode....I keep doodling and re-doodling future projects, so wanting to try something that lets me edit a little bit more easily. In general, pen and paper are grossly underrated, though. My whiteboard at my office gets copious use:-)
How do you handle tantrums from your kids?
Well, I'm not sure I have any specific advice. I mostly just wait them out. I don't do anything like bargaining or threatening, and they're still (mostly) too young to reason with. So the only thing to do is wait them out.
Which is not always easy, of course.
Thanks I pretty much do the same.
A follow up question if you don’t mind. Any advice on potty training? Feel like I’ve tried everything with my boy and he still only wants to go in his diaper.
The way we did it was by having him have "nappy free time" where we let him play with no clothes on (or just a shirt) and watched him like a hawk. Then see if we could determine signs. As soon as he started peeing we'd tell him "time to go to the potty" and take him there even if he was done. This was not the easiest process and waiting another 5-6 months might have made it a lot easier, but we were trying to do it earlier.
Diapers are designed to make it not-uncomfortable when you wet yourself, so if you switch to pants and underwear it may also be an improvement because they will really feel it when they do it. But it involves a lot of changing clothes for a few months to let them do it that way. If you leave them in underwear only you might notice a pee dot and thats when you take them to go.
Hope I'm explaining all this well enough...
Thanks Simon. All clear. We are doing great with pee. The problem that remains is he insists on only going poop in his diaper. He will try to go on the toilet but tells us he can't do it. So it is not for lack of trying. It's some sort of comfort thing.
What kind of potty setup do you have? We had a similar problem with the toilet but he is just fine using the BabyBjorn Smart Potty (a small ground-level potty they can get on themselves, feet on the ground)
Yep we use exactly that a small one thats ground level.
Hi Simon. Do you have any general guidelines for a home office? Some particular questions I have: would you face the wall if you are using screens? Would you use an ergonomic chair? Thanks a lot
I have a draft post on (almost) this question. I suggest you call it a studio, not an office, and don't make it look or feel corporate. It should feel like a place of creativity and be as messy as you want,.
My desk faces a wall, though it also faces two windows to either side so I can look outside quite easily. I will take some pictures to post on twitter some time (or for the studio post).
I would use an ergonomic chair if I had one, but I don't. I think about buying one a lot but they are ugly and (the best ones) expensive. I suppose I should buy one anyway, as I have no shortage of hobbies that are hard on my back. I think if you can easily afford it, a Herman Miller sounds like a great idea. I spent a long time when covid started using a dinner chair (that I found on the side of the road) which got very painful after a few months. I upgraded to a $99 office chair, which I hate only slightly less, alas.
Maybe here you have influenced me more than I have influenced you. Time to go look at chairs...
Thank you Simon! I like the idea about how to name it. Also, the main wonder about ergonomic chairs is the fact that they remind me a lot to the corporate world; but indeed here the trade of ugliness for back health might be worthy. I'll welcome so much that post. Have a good Sunday.
Yeah the "look" of the ergonomic corporate chairs drives me crazy. I really hate it. But I have so many hobbies that are hard on my back, never mind all the sitting that I do the rest of the time, that it feels like I should make peace with them.