2021

a roundup of successes and failures

Posted: 31 December 2021
Stats: 775 words / ~4 minutes

Satisfied.

I feel satisfied.

Did I do everything I planned?

No. Far from it.

What do I feel satisfied?

Because. That’s why. Just, because.

2021 felt like the fastest year ever. It flew by. I gave myself different things to do. I didn’t fully complete them, but I had a good time learning about these things.

But first!

I am a music person. I like listening to new music whenever I have the chance. So, I will start off with my…

Music Recommendations

Off the top of my head, here are a few albums that I listened to a lot this year:

Most of these albums can be found on Bandcamp. Consider waiting until the next Bandcamp Friday, so you can support the artist.

Things I tried

The Fediverse

Not being the most social person in the world does not mean I don’t need some sort of social network.

Upon discovering Mastodon, and the different instances, I jumped on the Fosstodon instance. I will probably stay put there. I haven’t looked at other instances, but there might be one that makes more sense for me.

Furthermore, I made an account on Bookwyrm, but still haven’t left Goodreads. I like their recommendations feature, and knowing when new books by my favourite authors are released.

I haven’t bothered with Pixelfed yet, but I might next year.

Blogging, Hosting, etc.

I got out an old Raspberry Pi and, with much help, got Nginx serving a Hugo blog. Then I paid a couple Euros for a domain name.

That domain will expire in about a month, and I won’t renew. I don’t blog enough, and srht has a nice hosting solution.

I fiddled with the Gemini protocol. Awesome fun. Easy too. For now, since I have unplugged my Pi, the server is gone. Maybe I will bring it back to life in 2022.

Time Wasting

I read some books. Not as many as previous years. I could probably make a very short book list. Right now, I recommend Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary and Martha Wells’ Fugitive Telemetry.

I tried to watch all of King of the Hill. Mike Judge’s amazing animated series from the 90s. I laughed so hard. The jokes still work today. I haven’t finished it yet. It is 13 seasons and a few bonus episodes. Some of the subjects he touches on are still debated today.

I used a Raspberry Pi 400 as my main computer for the better part of a year. It lead me to find new ways to waste time, like recreating my dozens of PPT lessons as Beamer slides. Totally worth it, except now I need to figure out LaTeX. Pandoc is awesome, but there are some occasions when I need a little more flexibility.

Excellent time-wasting indeed!

What’s next?

It is time to learn something. After making a longlist, and a shortlist, I have decided that 2022 is the year for me to learn a little programming.

The “how to learn” part came to me in a discussion with some colleagues, when they asked me how I know about [something]. I responded that I had to learn it to be able to teach it, because that is my job. That was the lightbulb moment.

In order for me to learn, I am going to pretend that I have to teach the subject.

The subject is Python.

In order to keep things organized, I have started doing something over on framagit codeberg.

If you click on over to my “Learning Python” project you will get my full name, and a look at my personal learning path for Python. Once things really get rolling, I will probably come bother the Fediverse for some original challenges.

The goal of this is purely personal, but if I can also put something on my CV, why not, right?

Happy New Year to everyone who made it this far.

Be safe, and have fun.

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