I don't want to bury the lede: my mum died this year. No matter what else went well this year, it was always going to be a bad year.
I started (and finished) a job with Internet Archive. My excellent dog, Zeus, passed away at 13½.
It has been a fuck of a year in many ways, but I am Doing Well™ right now.
Too much. I like being places but I don't like going to them. I spent over 24 hours in the air; probably nearly the same again in airports or on tarmac.
I went to Halifax, Kingston, Montreal, Chicago, New York State, Dublin and Cork. Technically I also went to Toronto and London (UK) — but only as connections to other places.
Halifax was fun. We went by sleeper train (The Ocean), riding in 90's cabins which were built for Eurotunnel. My wife and I had promised ourselves a trip to one of the coasts when we became Canadian citizens and this was it. Just like I found last year in Ireland, it's deeply energizing to look out over the ocean. I don't know why. I could see myself being happy living in Halifax, although I'm perfectly happy living in Ottawa, too.
Kingston was an AirBnB for a week with our dog, Zeus. It was a working holiday, as I was conserving my days off from Internet Archive. Unfortunately it coincided with one of the worst outages in a decade at IA so I had some out-of-hours work to do and the days were a bit intense, like handling any incident is. It's a pretty city but it's not for me. Amazing how much it looks like Dun Laoighre — clearly late 1800's British Colonial style.
Montreal was just for a concert. I should take more advantage of the fact it's only a two hour train-ride away and it has much more going on culturally than Ottawa does. Saw Cage the Elephant and at least four opening acts. Is this normal now?
Chicago was a fun time. I went for TOWN CON and vilmibm had rented a loft. The trip there was smooth (two little Dash-8 trips and light rail that actually goes to the airports) and the two days I spent were fantastic. It's weird to know some people for years and then get to meet a bunch in person. I went to the Bean, prejudiced into not liking it and thought it was actually pretty neat. It coincided with my last day at IA where I couldn't do a lot of work but I pushed my last few patches from airports and generally tried.
Dublin. It was a strange experience, especially because this time I didn't go with my wife and because I spent a chunk of that time with my brother and sister. It'd been 15 years since I saw my sister (literally at my Dad's funeral) and 8 since seeing my brother. We even lived together at an AirBnB for a few days.
I spent most of my time in Blanchardstown, near where Mum used to live and next to the shopping centre that I worked at when I was 18. I went out to Dundrum, where I grew up. This would have been somewhat emotional at the best of times, and these weren't the best of times. When my brother and sister were away, when I wasn't at the hospice and when my family in Canada were all asleep I felt profoundly alone.
Cork. I went down to visit my brother and his family while things were stable in Dublin. We spent the evening debugging his fibre Internet connection which makes me smile even writing this out. What else do you do with a brother that you haven't seen in nearly a decade? We had a nice walk through the woods with the dog and my nieces the next day before I took the train back up to Dublin. It was a welcome break and nice to see everyone.
New York State: We stayed in Watertown and came back through Ogdensburg. This was purely a shopping trip and an exercise in crossing the US (and Canada) land borders, which neither me nor Helen had done before. It was nice! We had a couple of good meals and hung out at our hotel. Even accounting for the difference between our currencies some things are hilariously cheap in the US compared to Canada.
Honourable mention: I was supposed to go to San Francisco for the annual event at Internet Archive. This formed part of my reasons for leaving, and I didn't end up going. Hopefully I make it out there at some point. (To the city, and to IA HQ).
Some new good habits. I read Atomic Habits when in Kingston (it was there in the AirBnB) — IMO it really takes one point (if you want to make a change in your life you need to establish a habit that leads to that) and makes a whole book out of it; but that one point is a good one.
The thing that I did immediately with that is to create a habit of defaulting to reading a book when I'm going to be bored, instead of doing something on my phone. That's things like commutes, plane trips, waiting in waiting rooms, relaxing in the bath (ideally I do nothing, but a book is better than having a podcast or something going). I haven't, like, 10x'd my reading this year, but I have read more and it feels good to take a little control of my attention span.
I also write week notes every week. It was particularly helpful when I wasn't working full time, and I knew I was busy — or at least occupied — basically all of the time but if you asked me "oh, what did you do today/this week/this month?" I would have to rack my brain to try and remember. It turns out that I usually get a lot done in any week, but without a record I would end the week thinking I'd wasted all of my time. These started out as just tracking what I was doing while I was getting back into computers after my break; the time immediately after my mum passed away.
I've continued to write on tilde.town's small-web space every few weeks. That's usually some kind of emotional check in, observation or occasional rant into the void. I stopped publishing this on HTTP to create a little more friction. They're not private-private but publishing to Gopher/Gemini/Finger limits the people who are likely to read it to (what I consider to be) like-minded people.
For a while I kept MIDI gear on my desk and started to create a habit of regular music practice / play, but that hasn't stuck. Desk space really is a premium as I tend to switch between things I use my office for. Just recently we've made it so it's much easier to sit and play at the piano (no stuff piled on the piano stool) — maybe that will help, too. I did a little bit of Looptober but not as much as I would like, which is what I say every single year.
I continue to keep a separate, private, journal of my feelings and thoughts. This is still helpful, even if just to get thoughts out of my head.
One proto-habit (not stuck yet) is that I now write down my TODO list before opening my laptop. It's easy to open the laptop and get distracted by my open tabs / email / IRC or whatever. Now I prefer to have "the reason I am on the computer" written down to keep me on track. So far so good, but it's only been a couple of weeks.
In the middle of the year we had a major, major clear-out of stuff. This is inextricable from deciding to give up on at least some hobbies. Some hobbies can be approached in a way that makes them less physical. SDR for amateur radio vs. having a full rig. Plugins instead of digital instruments. Virtualization instead of old computers. But some things can't and those hobbies basically got cut:
You can't weld without a welder.
(The welder went. But not just that: the gauntlets, the helmet, magnets, spool — the amount of space given over to welding was completely out of proportion to the amount of time I spent doing it, or enjoyment I derived from it).
Some of the biggest things were giving up on doing "proper" woodwork and metalwork. We were pretty much set up to build small pieces of furniture but we didn't do that very often. We had a full-size cabinet saw, a jointer, planer, all sorts of power tools. Now we still have hand tools we can use in a pinch, but that take up less space.
We're about six months into this experiment and I think that for both of us we've spent more time with the hobbies we decided to keep and which were worth it.
I continue to slowly go through Red Dead Redemption 2. It's a good game, it just loads slowly and that puts it at a disadvantage on the Steamdeck.
We played basically all of the Supermassive narrative games this year (Until Dawn, The Quarry, the Dark Pictures Anthology). The whole family would assemble and pass the controller around and generally complete each game in three or four evenings. Good stuff, but not replayable.
The best single player experience this year was Tactical Breach Wizards. It's turn-based game with no chance element, it's funny-in-a-British-way and it's not procedurally generated. And it's 15 hours long, so it doesn't out stay its welcome. The perfect game for me?
The Case of the Golden Idol was a highly unusual and enjoyable game of deduction. There's a demo on Steam with the first three levels. Not like any game I've played before, thanks PD for the recommendation.
Finally, Pentiment was game that made me think about Reformation Germany and what it was like to live through that period far more than any history class did. I am not sure that I found the game fun and I didn't finish the third act, but it made me think and it was memorable.
This was a good year for reading. Not neccessarily by volume (22 books) but some stand-outs.
"Quit" by Annie Duke was a recommendation from AM which helped me think more clearly about my decision to leave my job at Shopify last year and tbh also helped with the decision to leave IA this year. I do think it's worth actually reading and not just boiling down to a single point (unlike a lot of self-help / pop-psy books). But if I had to boil it down, a key point is to think about the "expected future value" of your current job/situation vs. anything else you could be doing.
"Gun Machine" and "Crooked Little Vein" by Warren Ellis. After I enjoyed "Normal" so much, I went looking for more. He's not written a lot of regular novels. I recommend Gun Machine, even though it's a light read. I don't know how to feel about CLV: I'm glad that I read it, but don't know that I'd recommend it to anyone else. The characters in it are pointlessly vulgar in a way that doesn't feel like it adds to the story.
"Ministry for the Future" by Kim Stanley Robinson. It was fine. I will continue to think about this as we live through the climate crisis and try to thread the needle of not ruining the future and what shifts in society would be needed for that. It's funny to me that I've seen people call it "hopelessly optimistic" online, when the book also involves non-trivial amounts of eco-terrorism. Doesn't sound that optimistic to me.
"Polostan" by Neal Stephenson. Fuck yes. This is like 90's Neal Stephenson; feels like it could have been another thread in Cryptonomicon. I await the future volumes in this alternative history series. I would rarely describe myself as a fan of Stephenson, but when I was speaking with a friend I realised that I've basically read almost everything that he's written.
"Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza & Marx on Desire" by Frederic Lordon. This is a very heavy text, translated from French, and I only read the first third. I will come back to it, though, as even that third has given me a lot of thoughts to chew on: especially on the role of liquidity in labour (and all other things) — and how it can be viral.
That is: the stock market makes ownership in a public company liquid, which makes its value subject to big changes. This means that public companies tend towards wanting their commitments to be just as liquid: contractors instead of employees, and rounds of over-hiring and then deep layoffs, as well as outsourcing and the conversion of CapEx to OpEx (i.e. "as a Service" or rental).
The same as last year but with more frequent and worse episodes. I'm still working with my doctor to figure things out: some things looked like promising theories this year but didn't help. Oh, well. Others have it worse.
This has been a difficult year, but in a way that doesn't matter. I think of depression in terms of feeling vs. reality. When things are bad and you feel down, that's pretty natural. In the past I've felt down when things have been objectively (or at least: superficially) good. That's not as natural.
(Obviously depression has a real clinical definition; this is my shorthanded way of thinking about it, just for myself)
So, despite the many bad things that happened this year, I think my mental health has been as good or better as could be expected. I acted sensibly and recognised when my feelings were out of whack.
When I was agonizing over quitting Internet Archive I recognised that I didn't want to leave because I'd be embarassed about only staying there for four months: that I'd made a big deal about joining and suddenly I was already out. I was even dreading telling my financial advisor I'd be going back to drawing down savings. But actually it's totally stupid to continue in a job you're not enjoying out of embarassment — doubly so when it comes to telling someone that I am paying about my decision.
Now that I'm not working full-time again, I feel calm about it. I actually feel so calm that it makes me realize (retrospectively) that I was not comfortable at all with this in the period between Shopify and IA.
No big news: I keep buying CDs and listening to rips. I also stream music when it's convenient. I am trying to purposely listen to albums. I've not bought much vinyl because I've noticed I listen to it less than CDs, which probably shows I'm not taking the time to go sit in the room with the record player and dedicate time to listening.
As for making music, I still noodle around and have switched to Linux which has reduced my options. Honestly that's a good thing: VCV Rack, Reaper and DecentSampler can get me very far and they all work on Linux. And I have my Minibrute which just got a firmware update to make it even more awesome. Constraints breed creativity; so I hear.
I gave learning Rust (again!) a proper go this year and I completed "100 Exercises to Learn Rust" and a few Exercism exercises. I built a couple of small web apps and two embedded Rust projects (on RP2040 and a SAMD Cortex M0 board).
I don't really like Rust.
I'm happy to have given it a proper try, but I'm also happy to recognise it's not my preference. If I had to work in it, I would, and I think I can be effective, but I would not choose it on a green-field project for myself.
So what else? Well, I think it might be Go. It's C-like enough that it suits my brain and it's safe enough that I don't introduce memory leaks or RCE in my code when I'm just trying to solve my problems. I am just as happy to if err != nil as I am to .unwrap() or match y { Err(x) ....
I was reunited with Python when I worked at IA and it's also good. Python was, in some ways, the first language I really loved and was my language of choice for many years, but I've changed into the kind of person who dislikes exceptions and prefers types, static binaries and a stability and backwards compatibility that's less prevalent in the Python community than it used to be.
When I'm doing embedded work, I guess it'll continue to be C. I am not putting people on the moon here, I think C will be fine (for me).
I set out a shingle of working for myself from March to June this year. I don't know that going back to the agency/contracting life is for me or retracing products that I built before. Mostly it was good to leave the house, go work somewhere, and feel like I was doing things with my life. A "job" is good for those things.
I joined Internet Archive (technically Internet Archive Canada) in June and left in October. (During, but unrelated to, the extensive downtime due to being hacked repeatedly). I really wanted this job and the interviewing had gone well, although there were some early warnings of things that would eventually contribute to me leaving.
IA is full of good people doing good work for the public. Even if that sounds obvious, I wanted to state that. I enjoyed my time there (working on unfucking databases — a recurring theme in my career) and when I decided to leave it was relatively sudden. It was surprising for my manager because it was basically surprising for me too.
When faced with a future of long distance travel to the US as the way to build team connections I had a gut reaction that was basically "I don't want this enough to do that". I can backwards rationalize a lot of it, and there's rarely one thing that makes someone leave a job, but that's kind-of it.
It was really enjoyable to start the week without dread, and generally to feel good about what my efforts are doing in the world ("Universal Access to All Knowledge"). It was pleasant to not be on-call (although I also think that if no one is on-call then everyone is on-call and a half-baked version based on who checks in on Slack or their email out of hours emerges). It was affirming to know I'm not so burned out that I can't just work a normal job again — all of that was going well.
I just think that I need to care about my work and my colleagues in a way that joining a later-stage organization and fixing tech-debt, with people who are mostly 3+ timezones away, doesn't inspire.
I'm one of those people who actually likes in-person work, I guess. I tolerated remote at Shopify because I'd spent four-years building relationships (including one with The Company) in person. Also, as critical as I am of Shopify, there are things there that make remote work across timezones easier, including how self-serve most things you need to do as part of your job are.
Quickfire round:
Bad years are bad. Figuring out who we are is our life's work. A lack of constraints is miserable (for me, but I suspect in general). I like people more than computers. Navel-gazing is fun.