Title: 2024 plans and 2023 retrospective | |
Author: Solène | |
Date: 09 January 2024 | |
Tags: life blog | |
Description: Let me share my plans for 2024, and my a recap of my year | |
2023! | |
# Hello! | |
It happens that I occasionally write a blog post to give some news | |
about my own projects and life(style), this is such a blog post! | |
# 2023's projects | |
2023 was a special year for me, I've been terribly sick early January, | |
and this motivated me to change a lot of things in my life. I stuck to | |
this idea the whole year and I still continue to lurk for changing | |
things in my life. | |
## Work | |
I left the company I was working for, and started to work as a | |
freelance DevSecOps/DevOps. The word "Sysadmin" would be the best job | |
title for me, but people like buzzwords and nobody talk about system | |
administrators anymore. | |
Since the end of the year, I also work as a technical writer for a VPN | |
provider (that I consider ethical), and it makes me think that in the | |
future, I may have a career shift to being a technical writer "only". | |
## The blog | |
Since 2023, I have a page on Patreon allowing my readers to support me | |
financially, in exchange for a few days of early access for most blog | |
posts. This is an advantage to reward my supporters without being a | |
loss for all other readers. Patreon helps me a lot as it allows me to | |
plan on a monthly income and spend more time on my blog or contributing | |
to open source projects. I also added other payments option as some | |
wanted to support me using more free (as in freedom) methods like | |
liberapay, BTC or XMR. | |
The blog also received a few technical changes, mostly in the HTML | |
rendering like captions on pictures or headers numbering. I'm quite | |
pleased with the result right now, and the use of GemText (from Gemini) | |
markup was a right choice a few years ago as it gives a simple | |
structure enforcing clarity (of course it's bad if you need a complex | |
layout). | |
The content finally got a proper license: CC-BY-4.0, I'm an open source | |
person, but my own content was under no license, what a shame for all | |
this time... | |
## Open Source | |
Last year, I started using Qubes OS as it's the best operating system | |
for my needs (a blog post will cover this "soon") and I got involved | |
into the community and in testing the 4.2 release that got out a few | |
weeks ago by now. | |
I'm still contributing to OpenBSD, but not as much as I want, simply | |
because of lack of hardware (and a bit of time), but this is now solved | |
after my deal with NovaCustom. I still maintain the packages updates | |
build cluster. | |
In 2023, I entirely dropped NixOS, but I preferred to not write a blog | |
post about it to avoid a flame war, but maybe I'll write one. In a few | |
words, I didn't like the governance issues of the project, it seems | |
company driven to me and from my point of view it's harmful for the | |
open source project. The technology is awesome, but the "core team" | |
struggles to get somewhere. I'll investigate more Guix as I always | |
enjoyed this project, and they proved they are a reliable and solid | |
project able to maintain their pace over time. | |
## The OpenBSD Webzine | |
It's my favorite pet project, even though it's a lot of work to publish | |
a single issue. | |
Working with Prahou for the special Halloween issue was really fun as | |
instead of writing the content, I had to give some direction to keep | |
the issue on rails for being a Webzine issue, while being able to enjoy | |
it like any other reader as I didn't make the content itself. | |
# 2024's project | |
## Lifestyle | |
For no reasons, I decided to experiment vegetarian diet up to end of | |
February (I still eat eggs, milk, butter, cheese or rarely fish). I'm | |
bad at cooking, I don't enjoy it much but mostly because I have no idea | |
what to cook. This forces me to learn about new food and recipes I was | |
not aware of. Buying a recipes book is definitely a must for this :-). | |
I never really enjoyed meat, and it's possible that I may keep the | |
vegetarian diet for a longer time. | |
## Open source | |
This is the year of the comeback on OpenBSD, I really enjoy | |
contributing to it, helping the community and reviewing some ports I | |
care of. | |
I'll also continue contributing to Qubes OS, this niche operating | |
system deserves some more contributors. | |
## The blog | |
I'll try to stick to a weekly blog post schedule. Of course, I also | |
need to work in parallel, and sometimes I'm just out of ideas :-) | |
## Work | |
Let's see what 2024 will bring for me! | |
# Best wishes! | |
I'd like to thank all my readers. I regularly receive emails about | |
your enjoyments, or typos reports, or suggestions to improve the | |
content, this really drives me continuing writing. |