It must be the start of a new year, because I feel the familiar twinge of guilt about not having written anything here, and an accompanying compulsion to rush out a "year in review" blog post. So here it is!
Side project
Last year I built a customizable pdf planner and calendar for my reMarkable 2 with a Google Form, TypeScript, and considerable duct tape and spit polish. This year I kept plugging away at it, and the response certainly exceeded my expectations. Scott Hanselman gave me an early Christmas present and the project made the top 10 of HN the next day. More improvents and some related projects are in the hopper for 2023!
New Tech
Tried out some new technologies this year and rather enjoyed them. Each of these should probably get their own post at some point, but for now I'll just say that I award my coveted seal of approval to:
- Remix – love the runtime agnosticism, so it works well with both Node and...
- Cloudflare Workers – turns out "serverless" isn't just an empty fad after all
- fly.io as a modern Heroku replacement
- Slonik for typed SQL without an ORM
Reading
Chewed through an even 50 books this year. Less than one per week; I must be slipping. Favourites were:
- The Righteous Mind Jonathan Haidt
- Software Design X-Rays
- Breath James Nestor
- The Happiness Hypothesis Jonathan Haidt (again)
- Project Hail Mary Andy Weir
- The Lords of Easy Money Christopher Leonard (very topical!)
- The Shallows Nicholas Carr
- Die With Zero Bill Perkins
- A Man for all Markets Edward O. Thorpe
- The Cuckoo's Egg Cliff Stoll
- Four Thousand Weeks Oliver Burkeman
- Anything You Want Derek Sivers
- The Psychology of Money Morgan Housel
- The Lazy Dungeon Master's Guide (family d&d was a new thing this year)
- The E-Myth Revisited Michael Gerber
- The Emperor of all Maladies Siddhartha Mukherjee
Music
Somehow I had never listened to Vulfpeck before this year. They're a fun band; I enjoyed going through their back catalogue and associated acts like The Fearless Flyers.
This website
Did pretty much nothing with the ol' personal website this year. With the surge in interest in federated web tech (thanks to Twitter's implosion), I'm regaining interest in sprucing up this site with Webmentions and other "indieweb" tech. To that end, I'm liberating an old list of links that have laid dormant in my Gmail tasks sidebar for eons, in case they're useful:
- Using Webmentions on Eleventy
- Implementing the Indieweb on a static site
- Indieweb building blocks
- Into the Personal Website-verse
- Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet
I resisted the impulse to rewrite this content-free site again, so that's a positive for the year at least. NextJS is still definitely a good fit for the low-maintenance static deploy that I favor, but if I ever dabble in the indieweb tech above, I might give Remix a spin here as well.