Published: November 14, 2023
A year ago, the most exciting thing I had to report on for this blog was my homelab. Oh wow what a year it's been since then!
While generally the focus of this blog has been tech, it's been a big year, so I thought I'd make this a bit more personal.
The biggest life update by far was that my wife Jennie and I got married in September <3. It was an amazing day and I feel so grateful to have such loving and supporting friends and family who traveled to celebrate us. Thank you to all who came.
As if planning the wedding wasn't stressful enough, we bought our first house mere months before in June! We were immediately thrown into the deep end with a leaky roof, an oil tank double the maximum age about to become an environmental disaster, a hot water heater with a broken coil flooding the boiler, a collapsed flue that was a CO risk needing a new liner, and a fireplace mantle that fell off and almost seriously hurt our home inspector. 5 months (and a good bit of stress) later, it's starting to finally feel like home. I'm still glad we bought the place, but I wouldn't do it again any time soon.
I've always found that my interests come and go in intense phases of deep study. This blog partially documents some of the technical ones; from wireguard to plan9 to gopher to text editors...
2023 was notable for breaking a common theme: the tech.
I became interested in Digital Minimalism earlier in the year. The general idea being to identify the technology that aids our lives and reject that which is just distracting and attention-grabbing. I don't claim to be the perfect practitioner (I reach for my phone more often than I should when bored), but with that mindset I've spent a lot less of my off-work hours at a computer (at the expense of this blog).
Among the new interests were:
In diversifying my hobbies beyond hacking at a terminal screen I've found some balance I was definitely missing. There's something inherently satisfying about fixing something physical in the real world in a way that solving puzzles in Scheme doesn't provide :)
With the wedding and majority of home work (a whole new type of homework) behind us, I'm hopeful I'll have time to go back and write about some of what I've learned! If not, well, know that it's been a great year :)