Last January I posted a blog post with some resolutions for 2021. I thought about doing a similar post for 2022, but I couldn’t quite convince myself. I’m not even entirely certain that I want to continue blogging at all. See, the thing is that nobody reads things thing but me.
I don’t really advertise. People might read it if they knew it exists. Maybe I should. I’ve always been too uncomfortable with self-promotion. I guess that’s something I could work on in 2022.
Part of me wanted to make it a goal to do more blogging, more consistently. I could set a goal for myself to publish X posts per month, or spend Y hours on the blogging per week. I could set up calendar reminders for time slots that would be ear-marked for the purpose of blogging.
Another part of me wonders if I should waste time blogging at all. After all, as I already mentioned, nobody’s reading it.
So a big part of my New Year’s resolution for 2022 is to try and decide what I want to do, and do it. Either I need to go all-in for the blog writing posts more consistently and trying to get some people to read it, or I give up the ghost entirely and find something else to not spend enough of my time on. That’s part of the reason why this New Years post hasn’t been published until mid-February.
2021 Retrospective
2021 was quite an interesting year. With the COVIDs, family and work, it was certainly a unique year. I did a lot of work on ParserObjects, but not nearly enough on my other personal projects. I started doing some F# tutorials but didn’t follow through with it. I would like to get back to it, but I’ve been missing the motivation to do that so far. While I used to want to spend every free moment writing code, I often find myself now struggling to find the motivation to get my hands onto the keyboard at all.
Part of what I think I need to do is find better things to work on. I need to write libraries that are actually going to be used. I need to join up with some existing projects where I can work with competent and driven groups of people and not just be all by myself all the time. That said, let’s look at some of what I’m looking at for 2022.
2022 Resolutions
ParserObjects
I’m still working actively on ParserObjects. There are a few things I want to do with that library this year, but I see an end in sight. The next major release, 4.0.0, will probably be the last that I work on it for a while. After 3.0.0 came out I still had a bunch of ideas of things I wanted to do but couldn’t fit in. With 4.0.0 approaching, I feel like I have gotten all of that out of my system. There’s no more obvious features that I need to do, but don’t currently have the time for.
So in 2022 I want to try and find a good stopping point, cut a good release, and hopefully put this project onto the back burner for a while. It needs to sit, mature, gain some attention and get some feedback from people who aren’t me.
Other Projects
CastIron is going to just sit for a while, I really don’t have any strong motivation to add anything there because the project just works for me in my use-cases. At some point you’re just painting the bikeshed and not adding any real value to the project.
StoneFruit, likewise, I would love to release v2.0.0. But I need a downstream project to use it. I can’t just imagine how it might be used, I need to actually see it used in anger so I can verify some of my design assumptions. Right now I just don’t have a driver to force me to innovate and develop.
SqlParser likewise is a fun idea but I don’t have any downstream use-case that is so urgent that it justifies the work that this project needs to reach 1.0.0. Right now this project is sitting.
None of these projects, unfortunately, are going to be in my list of resolutions this year.
Caesar III Augustus
Caesar III was a favorite game of mine as a kid, arguably the pinnacle of Impressions Games city-builder series. There exists an open-source re-implementation of the game called Julius, and a branch of Julius where new features and mechanics are being added called Augustus. Recently I have started contributing to Augustus in a small way and would like to do more contributions in the future. I’ve always wanted to get into game programming (I have a few ideas for games of my own, that I would love to implement eventually) and I’ve wanted to sharpen up my C skills after being unused for so many years. I’ll write more about this in a future post, but for now suffice to say that I want to “contribute more” to Augustus.
Modern Tech
There are a couple bits of modern technology that I would like to get more experience with, but haven’t yet had the chance between work or my personal projects. I want to do more stuff in the cloud and work with some of the interesting workflows there. I would like to get more into containerization and especially Kubernetes. I’ll have to find ways to get involved with these things, because it’s not just happening on it’s own.
Personal Stuff
I’d like to go back to school and possibly pursue a Ph.D. I’d like to lose a couple pounds and get my doctor off my case. I’d like to try to put an extension on the house, if we can find a sweet spot where lumber prices aren’t too high and mortgage rates are still low enough.
Onward
Like I said, I don’t even know if I want to continue blogging. I have lots and lots of drafts written, in various states of completion. I could easily put out more posts than I’ve been doing without too much extra effort, I just need to justify that any effort is worthwhile. That’s something I’m going to have to think carefully about.