40

Personal, Writing

So. Today is my fortieth birthday, along with also being Armistice Day (and Remembrance Sunday week) here in the UK. I feel like I should write something thoughtful about age and memory, although it’s entirely possible that the half-bottle of champagne and double whisky I have consumed are partly responsible for any feelings that I have something remotely interesting to say on either subject.

Aside from being a nice round number and the inspiration for half-a-dozen faintly humorous birthday cards, turning forty has a certain significance for me.  Some two-and-a-half years ago, I set myself a personal goal: I would complete a novel and a screenplay before my fortieth birthday. And last night, around 11pm, I finished the final scene (a phone call, a distraught mother, an estranged husband, a dying daughter), saved and closed the document, and brought to an end almost three years of near-daily writing.

It’s hard to judge whether it’s made me a betterer writerer, although it has definitely made me more aware of the mechanics of language and more appreciative of just how hard it is to sit down and create something from nothing. Ultimately I don’t know what I will do with the end results — they both need a lot of editing – but I’m happy that I was able to check something off my Life’s To-Do list.

Anyway, back to growing old. I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that occasionally this year my thoughts have turned to sports cars. I’ve let my hair grow a little longer to cover up the area where it’s getting a little thin. And I got a tattoo. I’m hesitant to call it a mid-life crisis, because that generally implies feelings of dissatisfaction and unhappiness with how one’s life has turned out, which couldn’t be further from the truth, but I’ve definitely been feeling … something. In her birthday card, my 89-year-old grandmother wrote: “the best is yet to come”, which jives with something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, namely the innocence of (relative) youth. When I look back at who I was at 20, or 30 — what my priorities were, what I thought was important, where I thought I was going — it’s easy to see, in hindsight, those manifestations of inexperience. With every passing year, I realise more and more how little I know about life. I’ve started to think that perhaps this is the permanent state of being an adult human; I like to imagine 80-year-olds frequently say to themselves, “Jeez, when I think back to when I was 70, what an idiot I used to be!”

I don’t think I’ve ever been afraid of getting old; I was never of the “it’s better to burn out than fade away” school of thought. It’s just a shame that nobody ever tells you that being 40 is just the same as being 24 … except that people will assume you know what you’re doing.

(As I wrote that last sentence, Spotify Random chose to give me these lines:)

“Pretty soon, you’ll be an old bastard too
You get smaller as the world gets big
The more you know you know you don’t know shit
‘The Whiz Man’ will never fit you like ‘The Whiz Kid’ did.
So why you gotta act like you know when you don’t know?
It’s OK if you don’t know everything.”

Code Club, a talk at Refresh Cambridge

Cambridge, Learning, Personal

At this month’s Refresh Cambridge event a couple of weeks ago, I gave a short talk about Code Club; what it’s all about, how to get involved, and what it is like to try to teach kids how to code. This is a summary of that talk.

Code Club

Code Club logo and cartoon robots

Against a background of media scare stories about a lack of British talent in massive global industries such as game development, and a more general feeling that children today are not given the opportunity to learn how technology actually works, a nationwide network of volunteer-led after-school coding clubs was born. Set up by two women, Linda Sandvik and Clare Sutcliffe, in April 2012, its goals were ambitious — a club in 25% of UK primary schools by 2015 — and it has since become a player in the emerging conversation around re-introducing programming to the national curriculum. (From September 2014, coding will be back on the school timetable for every child aged 5-16, making the UK the first major G20 economy in the world to implement this on a national level.)

Code Club is entirely dependent on volunteers, who come from a range of science, technology and engineering backgrounds. You don’t need to be a professional programmer to volunteer, although obviously an understanding of the basic logical structures underlying computer programming helps. It’s also not just restricted to schools; other venues such as libraries, community centres or museums could also be the perfect venue for a club.

As a volunteer, your commitment extends to not much more than one hour per week (plus travel time and a little bit of preparation) during school term times. Many volunteers find that their employers are happy to allow them the time off to volunteer for a good cause.

Projects

The projects, enough for an entire term’s worth of sessions, are provided by Code Club as downloadable PDFs. Each project walks the children through a logical progression of concepts, introducing more advanced ideas as they master the early simple ones. Topics covered at the moment are Scratch (a basic game and animation construction kit, encompassing many common programming paradigms), HTML and CSS, and Python.

Due to its visual nature, Scratch is a great place to start with the children (Code Club is aimed at ages 9 to 11, or years 5-6). They are walked through the basics of creating and naming sprites, assigning movement and actions through the use of loops and collision detection, and considering gameplay questions such as keeping score and determining win conditions.

As well as the PDF student handouts, the Code Club website also provides teaching materials covering the best way to deliver key concepts, and reminding you to allow the children space to explore and diverge from the plan. You can also download and print out supporting material such as door signs and badges — important stuff if you’re 9 years old!

All the lesson material is also open-sourced on GitHub, so if you find a mistake or want to contribute an improvement it’s only a pull request away.

What is it like?

Despite having been a school governor for a few years in the past, it was still intimidating to enter a classroom in the role of what seems, at least to the children, to be  a teacher. Giving a talk in front of an audience of adults is very different than trying to explain relatively complicated ideas to 9 and 10 year-olds, particularly when they have no qualms about interrupting with questions that would never have occurred to you to expect. Luckily, the children at our local school have been well-drilled in the right way to ask questions (hand in the air and wait), and once we had got through the initial basic introduction to Scratch and I had dispensed the project sheets they were all extremely excited with the material and eager to learn.

The most surprising thing was how engaged they all were. With my own children, I have plenty of experience in how difficult it is to hold their attention, particularly with anything that you have any enthusiasm of your own for, but in the classroom all the children dived straight in and were soon experimenting with their own ideas, from renaming sprites or choosing different ones to trying out different values for animation commands.

They were also genuinely helpful with each other. As you might expect there were one or two in each class who quickly grasped the concepts and rushed ahead, finishing the basic exercises quickly, but they would always (after proudly demonstrating their finished game to their friends) offer to help out the other members of the club, explaining where they had gone wrong or offering helpful advice.

Challenges

Of course, nothing is perfect, and information technology in primary schools is rarely of the highest quality. Teachers can also be very busy, particularly in small primary schools were one person can be filling several roles; often in such small schools, the person responsible for the ICT curriculum is not exactly what we would consider an expert.

There is also the occasional moment where the children’s attention will wander, or they will decide en masse to test your authority. But one of the main principles of volunteering at a club is that you are not there as a teacher; there should always be a member of staff present during the lessons, and it is their job to manage behaviour or dole out punishment, not yours.

How to get involved

If you’re interested in getting involved with a Code Club near you, or think your local school would benefit from hosting one, it’s very easy to get started. Contact the head teacher or ICT leader and arrange a visit to explain about Code Club (there are helpful materials on the website to help you). If they’re interested, they might ask you to attend an assembly to explain it to the children.

You’ll also need a criminal background check (DBS, what used to be known as a CRB check), and then it’s simply a matter of agreeing the regular time slot with the school. Some clubs run at lunchtimes, but most seem to be after school, from 3-4pm.

There is lots more information on codeclub.org.uk.  If you’re not in the UK, the new codeclubworld.org site provides information and advice about setting up a Code Club in other countries.

HybridConf, 2014

Learning, Sharing, UX, Web Design, Work

I’m just back from attending HybridConf, a 2-day web design/development conference in Stockholm. It was my first time in the city, and I found it strangely underwhelming. I don’t know whether spending so much time in Amsterdam has spoiled me when it comes to stunning architecture, but Stockholm just felt like it could be any of a dozen anonymous British cities, albeit with a lot more umlauts and street corner beggars.

The conference itself, in its second year and transplanted from Bath by organisers Laura Sanders and Zach Inglis, was excellent. The relatively small attendee count gave it an intimate feel, and the venue – the historic Rigoletto cinema – made this probably the most comfortable conference I’ve ever attended. Perhaps half of the audience were Swedish, with the rest travelling from all around Europe. There were even a few Americans present, and they in particular must have felt at home, as almost three-quarters of the speakers were from the US.

I and co-worker Erin Weigel managed to catch just about every talk; I particularly enjoyed Dan Rubin‘s opening talk about team communication (and it closely matched how we run our teams at Booking.com), and Scott Hanselman managed to be both funny and informative despite having to fit in a second unplanned appearance on stage to stand in for the missing Sara Chipps. But the highlights of the two days were both delivered by people building actual real things. Tom Soderstrom, CTA of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, gave us an insight into the sort of work going on there, and how they apply startup culture and thinking within one of the world’s most expensive projects.

Then on Friday, GitHub’s Andrew Nesbitt tempted the live demo gods by wiring together an Arduino-powered, joystick-controlled ball live on stage. I was only slightly disappointed that he didn’t attempt to feed his rabbit live over the internet.

We were of course there as sponsors in our ongoing quest to hire the entire world, and it’s good to hear during the many conversations I had with other attendees that A/B testing and experimentation is becoming a lot more of a mainstream aspect of modern web design and development. We’ve become something of a fixture at web conferences now, and people are much more aware of what we’re doing and how we work. We had sponsored Experience Design Stockholm‘s event the previous evening, where Erin had delivered a great talk on experimentation that was also well-received; I think it’s strange that more large companies aren’t using this route to directly mingle with our industry’s top talent and promote themselves as maybe being that potential next job.

Ten years

Editorial, Personal, The Site

On this day, ten years ago, I published the very first post on The Watchmaker Project. At the time, I wasn’t even using the URL, just a temporary Blogger address, but I wanted to join my voice with those discussing and guiding the web design community via blog articles and comment threads in every corner of the virtual world.

The internet, and web design and development, looked very different back then. There were very few content farms, churning out articles at the rate of several per hour. There was no Mashable, no TechCrunch, and no Smashing Magazine. A List Apart documented groundbreaking new techniques and thoughtful articles, and 9rules was the first blog network that had arisen as the acceptable face of the 90s ‘webring’, but other than that, everything was being generated by individuals writing on their own blogs, and commenting on each others’ sites.

It was great.

Within the first week of blogging, I was thrilled to receive comments from luminaries like Jon Hicks and Andrei Herasimchuk, and I soon felt as if I was part of an important community: those who cared about the web and wanted to take an active part in its future. I eventually got involved in initiatives like the biannual CSS Reboot, and later became a volunteer editor at Digital Web Magazine, eventually becoming its Editor In Chief in 2008.

These days, blogging seems so much less important than it did back then. One doesn’t need to share advice on how to achieve a particular effect or work around a nasty bug, because there are a thousand answers on Stack Overflow (or CodePen.io, or GitHub) already. Long gone are the days when everyone had specific Position Is Everything pages bookmarked. Now Google has all the answers.

Still, this will be the 426th post on this site. That’s an average of almost one per week, for ten years; a (theoretically) permanent reminder of a quarter of my life. And you know what? I don’t even care if nobody is reading any more. As Zeldman said:

Envious habits

Editorial, Sharing, Writing

In a propitious piece of timing, considering last week’s post on forming new habits, I read an article on Medium tonight about ‘The Myth of Creative Inspiration‘, written by habit-transformation guru James Clear. In it, he says:

The work of top creatives isn’t dependent upon motivation or inspiration, but rather it follows a consistent pattern and routine. It’s the mastering of daily habits that leads to creative success, not some mythical spark of genius.

So perhaps I’ve been going about this writing habit all wrong — it’s not enough to tell yourself you will find time to do something, you need to incorporate it into your daily routine. Clear uses an excellent metaphor to make his point:

Creative work is no different than training in the gym. You can’t selectively choose your best moments and only work on the days when you have great ideas. The only way to unveil the great ideas inside of you is to go through a volume of work, put in your repetitions, and show up over and over again.

He’s got a point. I’m finding it much easier to stick to a workout schedule when it is the first thing I do when I get up; if I deviate from that schedule, it’s much harder to find the time to fit it in later in the day.

Another interesting article, also on Medium: ‘How to Feel Successful and Not at All Inadequate in One Easy Step‘ is about the deleterious effect that envy can have on your ambitions. I suspect it is something that is particularly rife within the web design community, a combination of our need to over-share everything we do and the ‘rockstar’ culture that grew up around some of the pioneers and early adopters in the industry during the early 2000s. At one point, it seemed that all you needed to do to achieve book deals and worldwide acclaim (and, later, tens of thousands of Twitter followers) was to come up with some new way of floating elements, or build a simple yet beautiful web app and charge people for something they already had for free. Everyone else was trying to emulate the success of the chosen few. I was guilty of it myself, publishing at least a couple of attempts at sparking a new development trend, and announcing then quietly canning a web app or three.

I think perhaps it’s harder to let go of what seems an achievable dream. Once you leave your early twenties, only the most deluded still harbour dreams of becoming a rock star; but having that one great idea for an app, or discovering a new and more efficient way to do your job, is possible at any age. But, like anything worth doing, you have to work at it – again, the advice of James Clear is, well, clear:

…if you’re serious about creating something compelling, you need to stop waiting for motivation and inspiration to strike you and simply set a schedule for doing work on a consistent basis.

The Habit Trigger

Personal, Writing

The concept of a habit ‘trigger’ is not a new one. It is mentioned in the Wikipedia definition, as “the cue [...] that causes your habit to come about”, and discussed in articles about how to break or change habits. By identifying those situations that “trigger” our bad habits, the theory goes, we can consciously avoid them.

When it comes to engendering new habits, triggers can also be incredibly useful ways to alter behaviour. I’ve found that making sure to  identify or place a clear trigger right in your own path is the best way to trick your brain into remembering to perform the new actions you want to eventually become habit.

In my own attempts to introduce two new regular parts of my day — exercise and writing — I am making use of both physical and locational triggers. To remind myself to exercise every morning, I’ve placed a calendar next to my desk, so that it is one of the first things I see in the morning. Combining this with the Seinfeld “Don’t Break The Chain” method provides a visual trigger that prompts me to do my morning exercise.

To encourage a daily writing habit, I rely more on a location-based trigger. I get into work early and write over that first cup of coffee while the office is empty, or if I’m away in a hotel room I will setup my laptop so that Scrivener is ready and waiting when I wake up. Of course, this method has its drawbacks — at weekends or if working from home, it’s easy to get swept up in work or play and forget to find time to write. At times like those, a trusted to-do list that supports recurring tasks is invaluable.

Ultimately forming a new habit relies mostly on self-discipline, but anything you can do to hack your brain to make it a little easier to keep going can only be a good thing.

Jag Reehal: Responsive Workflow with Grunt, at Refresh Cambridge

Cambridge, JavaScript, Learning, Web Design

Grunt logo

At last night’s Refresh Cambridge meetup, the first of 2014, we were lucky enough to have Jag Reehal come to speak about his experiences with using Grunt — the JavaScript Task Runner — to facilitate easier development of responsive websites.

After some introductory slides to define responsive design (fluid grids, flexible images, media queries) Jag jumped straight into some live coding demos. Here’s a summary of what he demonstrated, with links to the relevant Grunt plugins in the NPM archive where I could find them:

  • A basic Gruntfile is a series of tasks that you want to run, written in fairly basic JavaScript. You can output text, warnings, and cause a task to fail.
  • The time-grunt plugin lets you see how long tasks took to run.
  • The grunt-concurrent plugin allows you to run two or more tasks in parallel instead of in series.
  • It’s easy to create your own Grunt plugin; use the grunt-init-gruntplugin as a template. It includes tests, which is a important part of any plugin.
  • Since we want to build a responsive page, we’ll need to access it on a variety of devices while developing. The grunt-contrib-connect plugin starts a basic server on a local address, so you can load your work-in-progress on your phone or tablet as you work. It also includes a livereload feature, so you don’t have to refresh each device after making changes to the source files.
  • We’ll be using media queries for responsiveness; in order to avoid repetition of values or breakpoints in our CSS, we should use a preprocessor like LESS or SASS.
  • The autoprefixer plugin is especially clever; just tell it what browsers you want to support (or even how far back it should go to support) and it will automatically fill-in browser prefixes for any CSS properties that need it. And the best thing is that you don’t have to worry about going back to change support when new browsers come out!
  • By using CSS compilers, we can easily split out the various parts of our code into logical areas, and import them into one single stylesheet.
  • The grunt-browser-sync plugin is almost like magic; it synchronises form values (and presumably UI state as well) across browsers/devices — update something on your desktop and the same change will appear instantly on your mobile! It also cleverly doesn’t force a full page reload if you update a source file; it simply injects only the updated file into the page, preserving any changes you have made. And it even lets you scroll in sync across devices too!
  • Images are the biggest web performance killer. Responsive images is a confusing topic; you must consider compression, spriting, and retina images. Spriting images in particular has always been a lot of work.
  • The grunt-spritesmith plugin lets you simply maintain a source file full of images; when run, the plugin converts all the images into a single sprite, together with the accompanying CSS. Adding a new sprite is now just a case of dropping the new image into a folder; no more re-calculating background positions!
  • Alternatively, you might want to use base64 encoded images. The grunt-image-embed plugin handles this for you (although obviously you need to balance the multiple files vs CSS size performance issues).
  • The ultimate icon solution is provided by the grunt-grunticon plugin, which takes SVG icons as its default type, while also creating a sprited PNG fallback and individual images, and uses JavaScript to decide which is the best format to use.
  • When it comes to larger images, no standard solution has been decided upon yet, but in the meantime the grunt-responsive-images plugin does most of the work for you. Simply provide it the large image and it will automatically create resized versions that are interpreted by the <figure> markup to serve different images depending on screen size. Only the images needed are downloaded.
  • An alternative is the BBC’s Imager.js library, which allows you to specify the breakpoints in a simpler JSON format rather than writing out a full set of srcsets.
  • For creating production-ready resources — concatenated and minified — there are plenty of plugins such a cssmin (for CSS), uglify (for JavaScript), smushit (for images), etc.

Unfortunately I had to leave before the end of Jag’s talk, but I’ll add any additional notes I receive from other attendees. It was a great demonstration of the power of Grunt’s plugin architecture (and I’m sure that a lot of these plugins work exactly the same within new-kid-on-the-block, gulp.js too), and reminded me of the recent blog post complaining that too often programmers don’t bother to automate repetitive tasks. Armed with the power of the relatively easy-to-install Node and Grunt, designers finally have a way to automate away the most time-consuming parts of their job, and concentrate on building great user experiences.

If you’ve never given Grunt a try, I highly recommend it; it’s not as scary as it looks, and you’ll be amazed at how much easier it can make your life!

Resolutions, 2014

Personal

For the last two years, my New Year’s resolutions have been pretty similar. Make more stuff. Write more stuff. Something about fitness. It’s tempting to come up with something completely off the wall for 2014, and declare that I will learn to speak Russian or take up water-skiing. I think the fact that I will be turning forty towards the end of the year is another pressing factor; these arbitrary lines in the sand have such psychological meaning to us, despite the knowledge that there really is no significance to this age or that.

My 2013

Looking back at 2013, I think I did reasonably well with my resolutions for the year. I wanted to finish building my own GTD application, and I think I’m 80% of the way there. Ruck is a PHP-based system built on CodeIgniter; it’s missing a few pieces of functionality and needs a bit of polish, but it’s working well for what I want from a project/task management system. I haven’t done much work on it recently, as I think tackling the latency by converting it into a JavaScript-powered app is the next logical step, and that’s a little outside of my comfort zone at the moment.

Despite reading fewer actual books than I did in 2012, I still feel I did alright in terms of trying to “read more”. And “write more” was definitely a success, to the tune of 75,000 words plus over the course of the year in various places, including a couple of experimental articles on my new favourite place on the web, Medium.com.

My final resolution, “more varied fitness”, unfortunately didn’t really go anywhere. I went on a couple of bike rides and took the kids swimming most weekends, but I still mostly confined myself to running. I even had a couple of half-marathons planned until foot issues laid me up for the last couple of months of the year.

For 2014

  1. Take more photos. To start with I’m going to resurrect a resolution from 2012 which I never made much progress with. I’d like to take more photos, but carrying around a heavy SLR all the time is not really an option. However, this year I have a new favourite toy — my shiny new iPhone 5s — and with that high-quality camera constantly in my pocket, I have hopes that I can manage to take more photos than the odd Instagram of my dinner.
  2. Be a good role model. There are a bunch of different things I could put here — keeping myself fit and healthy, making the CodeClub I’m starting next week successful, being a better manager and leader at work — but I think this covers all of those plus a bit more besides.
  3. Do something different. Aside from the photos, all I ever seem to do is web-based. This year I should really try something else occasionally. I have no idea what that might be, though.

So, more conscious self-improvement? Or just another arbitrary list against which to judge myself in another year’s time? Time will tell.

Oh, and I think I might get a tattoo; it seems a more sensible way to act out a mid-life crisis than buying a motorbike.

Reading List 2013

Books, Personal

After skipping a couple of years, in 2012 I once again started to record a summary of the books I had read over the previous twelve months, using my handy Goodreads account (not that I ever use the site for anything else).

Looking back, this year seems a paltry amount compared to last, although I suppose the fact that I undertook a literature history course in 2012 skewed the results somewhat. I’m not going to bother splitting the fiction list up into fiction/fantasy this time due to the shortness of the list; any links are to my reviews blog.

Fiction

  • Ed the Happy Clown (Chester Brown)
  • The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway)
  • Apocalypse Nerd (Peter Bagge)
  • Player One (Douglas Coupland)
  • The Dispossessed (Ursula Le Guin)
  • Tigana (Guy Gavriel Kay)
  • The Great Gatsby (F Scott Fitzgerald)
  • Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
  • Speaker for the Dead (Orson Scott Card)
  • The Shambling Guide to New York City (Mur Lafferty)
  • A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway)
  • The Fellowship of the Ring (JRR Tolkien)
  • Sweet Tooth (Ian McEwan)
  • The Bloody Red Baron (Kim Newman)
  • Mentor (Tom Grimes)
  • Wolf Hall (Hilary Mantel)
  • Stoner (John Williams)
  • Redshirts (John Scalzi)
  • Bring Up The Bodies (Hilary Mantel)

As per usual the start of the year was dominated by Christmas presents, including a set of three Hemingway novels; I greatly enjoyed A Farewell To Arms, and still have For Whom The Bell Tolls to read next year. I also finally read Ender’s Game, just in time to not bother going to see the movie, and finished the year with Hilary Mantel’s pair of Booker prize-winning novels about Thomas Cromwell.

Non-fiction

  • Don’t Forget To Write (Pam Hobbs)
  • Getting Things Done (David Allen)
  • The Stranger’s Long Neck (Gerry McGovern)
  • The Naked Jape (Jimmy Carr, Lucy Greeves)

This list is a bit of a fib to be honest, since I finally finished the first two books which had been in a partially-read state for years. The one book I read for work, The Stranger’s Long Neck, was thought-provoking for anyone involved in UX.

Highlights

Out of the 23 books I managed to read, I think I’d have to put the pair of Mantel novels near the top of the pile. Despite their provocatively misleading style, they are beautifully written. Stoner is the other book I would recommend anyone pick up if they haven’t read it (and it seems to be one of those “best book you’ve never read” kind of hidden gems).

What I Listened To In 2013

Music, Personal

I’ve been writing this yearly overview of what I’ve been listening to for several years. And yet, despite feeling that I am discovering new music every year, the top few bands somehow remain the same. This year seems particularly bland and uninspired, with hardly anything new in the list. Maybe Spotify has made me complacent about listening to new music; despite feeling that I’m experiencing more different music than ever before, it’s all an illusion.

Top 10 Artists listened to in 2013

  1. Metric
  2. Ginger Wildheart
  3. The Wildhearts
  4. Hey! Hello!
  5. Pearl Jam
  6. Young The Giant
  7. The Joy Formidable
  8. Guns N’ Roses
  9. The New Pornographers
  10. David Bowie

Comparing this year’s top ten artists to last year’s list, the top three remain the same, albeit in a different order, and two more entries from 2012 are still in my top ten. I don’t even remember listening to that much GN’R or New Pornos over the last twelve months, yet somehow they still manage to wind up near the top of the list year after year.

Top 10 Albums listened to in 2013

  1.  Synthetica – Metric
  2. Young The Giant – Young The Giant
  3. Hey! Hello! - Hey! Hello!
  4. The Big Roar – The Joy Formidable
  5. The Very Best of Ella Fitzgerald
  6. Tricks for Dawn – Mary Lorson
  7. 555% – Ginger Wildheart
  8. Copper Blue – Sugar
  9. Black Pudding – Mark Lanegan & Duke Garwood
  10. Fantasies – Metric / Spilling Blood – Oceanographer

Now this list of the top albums I listened to is at least a little more interesting and varied than the artists list.

I discovered Metric towards the end of last year, and I’ve spent a lot of time listening to their back catalogue, particularly 2012′s Synthetica. This year I also finally listened to Sugar’s excellent debut, Copper Blue, 20 years after everyone else in my generation. A single album that was actually released in 2013 sneaks in, in the form of ex-Screaming Tree Mark Lanegan’s collaboration with Duke Garwood. And I spent quite a while listening to the various excellent projects produced by ex-Madder Rose singer, Mary Lorson.

Track of the Year

According to Last.fm the track I listened to the most over the last year was actually Massive Attack’s Teardrop. But a close second was this standout track from my #1 album – Breathing Underwater by Metric: