2021 status and 2022 plan

Posted on 2022-01-19

I don't usually write status update, even though I like the idea, because I'm most of the time too lazy to do so, but I thought it was a good way to kick off this year with a first post.

I'm still unsure while writing this if I will actually publish it on my blog or on my gemlog. I guess I like the idea of using my blog only for technical posts, so it might end up in my gemlog…

2021 at a glance

Writings

Starting with my blog, I published 17 articles last year. I had in mind 1 or 2 posts per month and the average is there. If I look at the details though, I can see I published 16 of them during the 4 first months of the year, and only one in December. It show how difficult it is for me to stay consistent with feeding this blog…

I can balance this though with the fact I write on my gemlog too and that it may have impacted my writing on my blog even though the subjects are usually different.

Looking into more details, I published 5 posts about gemini, 5 about my home automation setup and 6 about my self hosted cluster in general (some posts appear in multiple categories).

I can't share any stats because I have none (by choice), so I don't know how many people came here, but I'm guessing that there aren't many (which is perfectly fine too). All I can say is that I received several emails last year regarding my mutli room audio setup with mopidy and snapcast¹, so I'm guessing that the most read one 🤷.

I created this capsule the 10th of Feb 2021, almost a year ago. I wrote my first gemlog entry on the 18th of Feb and wrote in total 12 posts on it in 2021.

Funny to see that my gemlog entries are either for talking about gemini related stuff or for rants :P.

I managed to keep writing on my gemlog in a longer time period as I wrote all 12 entries between February and August.

No published content after that, even though I stayed active with my tiny log a bit more, but apparently I couldn't motivate myself to write anything.

Cumulating both blog and gemlog posts makes a total of 29 posts… which is more than I thought last year when I started writing again, so that's a win for me :).

Of course, a challenge for next year could be to be more consistent during the year… We'll see :).

Gemini related projects

Last year, I worked on different projects related to gemini. The main one being GTL (Gemni TinyLog)⁴, a TUI/CLI app to follow geminauts tinylogs easily. I grew fond of the Tinylog idea and even tried to write an RFP for it⁵. Unfortunately it didn't grow in the community and the number of active users in the tinylog space is quite limited, but I still like it so 🤷.

Still related to tinylog, I still run a global tinylog gemini page where you can read all known tinylogs in a global timeline format⁶.

All my gemini related applications are written in Golang, that was for me the way of learning it for something I thought would be useful (and I use GTL almost daily). So 2 birds, 1 stone as they say. I enjoyed it quite a lot too!

I'm planning to add a few improvement in GTL and then try to find some other useful tool to build for the gemini space. When I see what @Skyjake is doing for the gemini space, I'm very impressed by his work quality (Lagrange is just awesome) and his good ideas like earlier this month with cosmos. That was 1 thing I thought was missing to help people understand better "response posts" between gemlogs!

It does raise other question, like for Antenna, of the centralization in the gemini space, but we need better tool and ways of being a community, so any improvement is the right way!

Home Automation

I've written a lot about home automation early last year and less after. The reason being I wanted to explain at least the big part of my setup. That took quite a few articles but then I didn't make much changes (except keeping the stack up to date and few tweaks). For 2 main reasons: 1/ It works quite well, so « if it ain't broke, don't fix it », and 2/ I didn't spend time adding new automation last year, part because I was lazy, part because I didn't want to "overdo" it for no good reasons…

At this stage, I don't have big changes in mind for my home automation setup, but that's the kind of things that can change quickly to scratch an itch, so we'll see where my mind brings me this year on that topic :).

Selfhosted Swarm Cluster

The pi swarm cluster worked quite well last year, except when the SD card of the manager node died⁷ for some reasons and I had to resetup almost everything. The good news about this is that I could reuse my previous blog posts to redeploy everything a lot faster. Proof reading and validating the articles at the same time, so that was great if I keep only the plus side about it.

I do have plans to continue writing about it as I didn't finish explaining the whole thing but these posts are the longest to write and it can be very tough to motivate myself…

Reading

I usually set a target of 24 books per year. I don't really care what type of books or their size, so that number is really arbitrary and doesn't mean much…

Also, I didn't make it… I "only" read 20, less than the 23 in 2020 and 22 in 2019…

I "comfort" myself by thinking I've read bigger and more complex book this year (which is true to some extent) but that's not really an excuse. I keep a spreadsheet of my "to read" books and indicate when I read one. I can clearly see that same as for the blog/gem posts, I have a "drop" at the end of the year…

(Of course, I don't count the hundreds of manga I read each year :p)

As written previously in this gemlog, I'm trying to move more of my reading "offline", or at least away from a classic screen². I've been quite happy with my boox Note Air to read ebook and my saved articles via wallabag, both for web and gemini article (thanks so much skyjake for the small feature in Lagrange to retrieve the current open tab³).

I didn't manage to stick to my schedule I describe in that previous gemini post to stop using classic screens at least 1h before bed. But more on this later.

What about 2022?

I'm not going to write what I'll do or work on this year, because I know I won't follow it exactly anyway, but I have a few things that are important to me to think/do/work on:

• I'll write a dedicated post about this, but reading what @Ploum is trying to do this year by staying as much as possible offline made me think a lot lately. I don't want to do the same thing at all, but I've been thinking for a while now to have a "better and healthier" internet usage. It doesn't mean I want to go offline (I couldn't for professional reasons anyway), but that I want more control (like for my data, but for my time spent on it too).
• Continue writing on this gemlog and on my blog. I would love to manage 12 posts on each, better spread during the year.
• Invest more time in my pinephone. I have the first braveheart edition, and the goal is to work on the software I still need to use it daily. I plan to buy the pro version and the keyboard later this year and make it my daily driver. I want to have a good workflow on the braveheart first and remove the blocking issue I have. I'm planing to have a mix setup of my android for work and a pinephone for personal usage, but I'll write more about this soon
• Invest more time in my banglejs 2 watch, even though for now it does very well the small things I want it to do. I don't want the equivalent of an apple watch at all, so I may not need to invest too much time on it. Also, because apps are written in javascript and that I hate that language, I'm postponing as much as I can the day I'll write code for it :p (yes I know it's a bit ironic)
• Manage to read 24 books, as I've never managed to achieve this since I started counted the number of book I'm reading. But at the same time I don't want to "cheat" by reading smaller/simpler book just to get there, so we'll see… One thing for sure, my "to read" list has way more than 24 books already waiting for me…

Conclusion

This post is now way longer than anticipated when starting typing… I believe I already most of the people that started reading this, but it was nevertheless a good exercise :).

I don't usually mentioned my "work life", but it would be a lie to say it has no impact on my energy / motivation to work on these personal projects… I've been in the same company for soon 8 years (my record by far) and I still enjoy it a lot! But as well it is a time consuming job that sometimes require long weeks that leave me with no will to write or code.

I accepted that for some time now, that's why even when I say I want to write X posts or read Y books, I always look at it with relativism :)

Let's hope for a great 2022!