Well, shit. I'm writing this on the last day of 2020 and thank goodness this year is over. There are plenty of reasons I am very pleased to see the back of this horrible year (COVID being the obvious one) but this isn't the place to write about that. This annual post is traditionally about reviewing my new years resolutions and reminding myself of all the creative things I've managed to do. It has, after all, not all been Division and ... err ... Division 2.
- 18 posts on this blog (19 including this one) - sixth consecutive year of a post per month
- regular posts reflecting on life in lockdown
- did some writing (and GMing) for a MUD
- continued running a weekly exercise class in the park in Bath
- another year of the Year in Pictures site - this is the sixth year and we're up to 29 photographers
- started a Rails project linking Humble Choice to Steam tags, re-learning a load of good developer craft skills
- rebuilt my server from scratch
- learned about Github Actions
- built a pihole for my home
- renovated the home network at my parents' house (and made them a pihole too)
- upgraded all my live projects to use a modern version of Ruby and etc
- 298 contributions to various projects on github (well up on last year)
- learned the basics of wood turning (and made two bowls)
- extensive instagramming
- loads of photos on my flickr stream
Resolution count - 6/10. Nice.
Frankly, I'm astounded that this year of all years I've managed this much. I also achieved one of my stretch goals (of five but that's not the point). This is testimony to my own levels of awesome. Or, more accurately, this is testimony to a lot of effort to not just disappear into work during lockdown.
Speaking of work, I deliberately don't reflect much on work int this post but there is something worth remembering. This year I made some decisions and moved out of London and back to Bath properly. While it has been in the middle of a pandemic, so hardly the homecoming I anticipated, it still has been fantastic to stop the commute and live in one place again.
Next year... well. I've been writing this review post for seven years now, starting way back in 2014. In the last few years each year I've written some variant of "this year has been all about work - something to change next year". Then I've utterly failed to actually follow through. With lockdowns and COVID, work and life are blurring which makes stepping away all the more difficult so this year I'm going to have to work much harder at building a non-work life. However, I've been making some progress recently with picking up programming again and as long as coffee shops reopen before too long I hope to carry this on and build on it.
Nobody knows what 2021 is going to bring. Normally, I write about wanting to do things and learn things and so on. But the world isn't set up for that at the moment. I have my normal hopes, but more importantly next year is about the people. Life is exceptionally dark at the moment, so what can I do to bring a little light?
2021. Here we go.
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