| 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. |