How I Learned To Own My Mistakes

Those of you have the esteemed title of “one of my LinkedIn connections” will know that I recently shared this site there and basically tricked you all into having a gander by making it seem way more interesting than it actually is, like your friend who tricks you into coming to a party and it’s just them sitting there in a rocking chair.

Made myself a bit sad there.

It had been over a year since I created the site, and I’d mainly been promoting it via Facebook, Instagram and sidling up to people at buffets and using sheer social awkwardness to get them to look at it, and very politely say “very good” before alerting security. 

Sharing my work on LinkedIn

For some reason, the idea of sharing it on LinkedIn terrified me. 

I’m not a person comfortable with putting my name to work I think, preferring to work as part of a team and LinkedIn’s wider reach scared me. 

But I took the plunge last week and shared my blog with a lot more people than I was used to.

What went wrong?

And then I noticed it looked awful when viewed through LinkedIn’s in-platform browser thingy (way to flex your technical knowledge there Matt). This realisation was not mediated by the fact I instantly knew what caused the problem. 

There were areas of the site where I was defining the size or position of objects by how much of the “viewport” I wanted it to take up (back on top with the technical jargon!). But when viewed through LinkedIn’s browser thingy, the viewport size changes depending on whether you scroll up or down.

This means that certain images and text looked awful and left me in quite a pickle. I’d really planted my flag in one of my earlier posts that I wouldn’t retroactively change anything because it could then stand as a testament of my coding journey. 

But it really really bugged me.

What did I do?

So I changed it. 

I suppose me writing this is an attempt to rationalise this decision that I have been massively overthinking. Seriously, picture a president in an alien invasion movie pacing about the Oval Office and you have the level of severity that I was taking this, which shows my staggering level of self-absorption. 

But really, over the course of writing this I have learned two things

The first is that I can genuinely waffle for over 500 words on literally anything, including my banal decision to change the position of a circle on a blog post about 9 people read.

The second is that you can change your mind on something, and it not be the end of the world. If you made a promise to yourself six months ago, it’s not the worst thing ever to discover the exceptions to this rule, or slightly tweak it if it’s better for you, your peace of mind or overall work output. To summarise from the 🐐 :

“The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.”

Yes, I did just use the words of one of the greatest athletes and people of all time to justify my tweaks to my ramblings about squid game and the 29 quid I spent on a Nando’s once.