First, some context. I am under no such delusion as to think that there is really anybody reading this blog. Rather, writing it is more an exercise for myself. The mere reality that somebody could be reading it means I have reason to adjust my writing. It pushes me to consider my tone, and how it could be interpreted by imaginary readers that probably do not exist. It helps me to consider whether my posts can easily be understood by others, or whether there is an absence of important context that is harmful to the clarity of said writing. Which is just to say, writing in this medium is more a tool for myself to improve my own communication skills, rather than to actually communicate these ideas to others.
As such, I think writing a status update of where things are at for me (regarding software) would be helpful for me to recognize some of the things I have been working on, despite the last few months having been somewhat of a dry-spell for my own projects. In some ways this blog helps to capture some of that information already. In February I wrote a post about updating the blog itself. In April I wrote about how to balance different audio channel volumes on linux.
However, there are other activities that I don’t end up writing about. Recently I also updated my Telegram <–> IRC bridge to clean up some of the bugs that had been causing me issues. I wrote this bridge in python about a year ago so I could live happy in my IRC world yet still communicate with the people in my life. I also got my first experience with soldering, building both a Ploopy trackball and an Iris keyboard from the DIY kits. Speaking of my keyboard, I also took the opportunity to learn to write the QMK configuration in C rather than using the GUI. This allowed me to use significantly less space and maintain the many layers I had configured on my Moonlander MKI. I spent some time refactoring my self-hosted stack, consolidating services on fewer machines to cut costs. Most recently I also setup a private syncthing bridge, only accessible via wireguard, that allows me to replicate a dropbox-like sync experience without my data ever leaving any of my machines (encrypted or not).
So while I have been writing less code in my free time thus far this year, it is still fun to look back and recognize some of the things I have achieved in that time.