Showing posts for Year in Review

• Tuesday, 31 Dec 2024 12:15 pm

  2024

  Here we are again. It’s been a busy December and in the wind-down days the house has been dim and quiet and I’ve had a chance to reflect on everything that happened this year. It’s been a full one as usual, but it’s also been characterised by a series of missed expectations and malfunctions that we’ve done a poor job of staying on top of.

  Winter

  January started with a fizzle. We’d decided to undertake some house work (replacing worn laminate with tiles, refurbishing the downstairs bathroom) but the work was slow going and we struggled to motivate ourselves to actually knuckle down and do it. The result was that, for much of the winter, parts of the house remained sort of semi-furbished.

  We were no luckier on the automotive front; our daily driver started producing problems from nowhere and we struggled to keep the Porsche that we’d bought at the end of last year running reliably. We did do some light maintenance work, but kept getting rebuffed by bad weather: driving wind, piercing chill, endless days of rain. The waterlogged fields we took Ghyll roiled like rough sea at our feet.

  

  

  

  Neither could I find solace in books: after finishing Jon Fosse’s bleak Trilogy I spent the following 5 months trying to fight my way through Dhalgren on a decade-old recommendation. This book broke me. I spent much of the rest of the year trying to rediscover why I read in the first place.

  I found a bright spot in running at the weekend in preparation for the Fellsman, a challenge I decided to undertake back in 2023 but which I didn’t write about in my previous annual recap. I planned a few really nice runs through the North York Moors and in the Yorkshire Dales over the weekends, and enjoyed every minute of them. Not so enjoyable, however, were the increasingly long weekly runs during the week: dark half marathons undertaken with Ghyll after work that kept me away from home for hours and hours at a time. In late January one of these long runs aggravated a longstanding strain injury and I wound up not running at all for a few weeks—which was maybe just as bad as running too much. Only the frequent application of extended stretching exercises made any difference.

  In February we had solar panels installed at the house, to nearly no immediate effect—in February the sun is weak and thin if it comes out at all. Still, it was exciting to watch the current flow through our house and percolate on savings to come.

  

  

  

  Later on in the month we decided to give ourselves a break and flew to southern Spain for a long weekend at a family member’s villa. I can take or leave Spain as a country, but the trip was just what Sam and I needed at the time: an opportunity to neglect our responsibilities at home and spend some time together in the sun.

  Spring

  February turned to March and a faint blueness returned to the sky in the last minutes of my workday. Light was, gradually, returning to the North East of England. This coincided with an increase in weekly mileage ahead of the Fellsman in an attempt to make up for missed training during my injury recovery period. If I’m honest, I don’t remember a lot of March and April: I ran nearly constantly, through forest and across fell, traversing ancient trackway and erstwhile railway, under and over bridges, through mine workings, past pubs and holiday cottages. Many of these were truly lovely runs, but so engrossed was I in trying to stick to my training plan that I don’t think I really appreciated them at the time. I was constantly on the internet looking up ultrarunning race reports, rereading mandatory kit lists, packing and unpacking my running backpack in anticipation. The whole season was unhealthy: I was burnt out on running.

  

  

  

  In March we received a bothy report indicating that someone had knocked a hole in the flue of the stove at Haughtongreen, so we went out to investigate: it turned out that someone had simply misplaced the hatch cover for sweeping the flue (it was later found hanging from the ceiling). This whole saga—investigating the hole, measuring for some repair, finding the hatch cover—took a couple of weeks to puzzle out.

  At length, British Summer Time began and the days suddenly got much brighter. Fellsman training wound up and then it was time for the race itself. After the ordeal of training, the race itself almost seemed like an anticlimax—especially given quite how much of the race I wound up walking due to a tendon issue in my left knee. In the days and weeks after the race I continued with some light running but couldn’t motivate myself to take it seriously; as a result I suffered during a pacing run for a friend’s Bob Graham attempt a few weeks later.

  

  

  Summer

  Summer rolled in without fanfare, a scattered handful of sunny days and warmish temperatures. On these days the solar panels kicked into overdrive and we wound up generating far more than we could produce. Still, the projects that we’d undertaken over the previous six months continued only in fits and starts.

  

  The tiling that we’d gotten started with back in January remained unfinished—the tiles had been laid, but we didn’t get around to applying the grout until May. Once the grout had set, we discovered that the grout clings to the natural stone floor tiles we used, and had to spend a couple more weekends on hands and knees scraping grout residue—followed by the relatively easy but time-consuming process of painting and installing new skirting boards. But by midsummer, the flooring work was (mostly) complete.

  Around this time as well, the Porsche sort of conked out, cutting out and refusing to restart. I suspect that it has something to do with the fuel system, but I haven’t gotten back around to properly diagnosing it, even today. With everything else going on, we also neglected to take the motorbike back out for a ride; the expiration of our Compulsory Basic Training certificates in May put the kibosh on any further riding over the summer.

  

  

  At the end of May, we jetted off to the States for a week to celebrate my sister’s engagement party. We’d been away from the family for a year and it was wonderful to get to celebrate with them, even briefly. We spent most of the time in the pool and stopped in Atlanta on the way home for some awesome barbecue. Back in the UK I started counting down the days until we returned for the wedding proper in December.

  Another couple of weeks, another trip—this time to France on a motorhoming expedition. I’d originally planned to participate in a sprint triathlon in Chantilly, but I’d done no training in the pool or on the bike up to this point and decided to skip it and loiter around in the Ardennes with Sam and Ghyll and fancy beer and cheese instead. In retrospect this was definitely for the best.

  

  

  

  

  We whiled away the rest of the summer on short walks and runs with Ghyll. Later on in the summer we even took Ghyll wild camping a couple of times, the first time we’d been out in the wilderness with him overnight. Over the past year, he’s either calmed down a lot or we’ve gotten better at identifying and avoiding his triggers. I can’t tell which.

  Autumn

  As the summer faded into autumn, we were back up at the bothy to finish up some jobs—painting, tidying, splicing a doorframe, clearing out some overgrown nettles. We left the bothy in good shape for the winter ahead.

  

  

  

  I also ramped up my running again, this time in preparation for the Loch Ness Marathon. The first few weeks of training went well, but a trip down to the office in Leeds shook my schedule up, and then Sam and I were struck down with covid—and in the end I never really wound up getting back into the swing of things. By the time that the marathon came around, I didn’t think that I was in particularly bad shape—but poor sleep and nutrition caught up with me and the wheels came off halfway through. I wound up missing my target pace by like half an hour and came home from Inverness pretty bummed.

  At work, we completed a long-running project to transition from an old system to a new one. I also spearheaded a project to modernise the UI of an internal application, addressing a bunch of accessibility and experience issues—which felt like progress! I can tell, however, that I’m moving into a period in my career where I no longer really care about What’s Going On in JavaScript. I’ve spent a not-inconsiderable amount of the last seven-ish years trying to keep up with the meta, listening to podcasts and following blogs, wondering whether I should lean more into producing Web Development Content—but I just don’t care anymore. Liberating.

  Around the time that the clocks went back, Sam and I, along with her dad and his partner, started volunteering with a local Scouts group in Hartlepool. It’s been a fun way to get involved in mentorship for kids, though I feel like we haven’t quite had enough time to properly make a difference yet. More to come in 2025.

  At the end of November, Sam and I took some time off for her birthday and we did some local sightseeing, including a tour of Durham Cathedral, a night out at a fancy restaurant, a day at Beamish, and a walk with Ghyll in the snowy hills of the Lake District. There's so much to see and do in our little corner of the country, and we'd spent so much of the year in our home or out on running trails in the dark that giving ourselves the space to enjoy a week without expectations was expectedly refreshing.

  

  

  

  

  Winter again

  And so it started getting cold again, and dark. Since the Loch Ness Marathon I’d decided to focus on more speed work in my running, to positive results at the Brampton to Carlisle road race and at the one cross country fixture I’ve made it to.

  With the prospect of a full December looming, we made one last push to finish the projects that we started at the beginning of the year: stripping the remaining adhesive spillage from the tile floor, fitting the remaining hardware in the bathroom, laying carpet runners on the stairs, sorting out the bedroom where, in a few short weeks, dad and his partner would be coming to visit.

  

  Before that, however—a return to the United States, for my sister’s wedding in south Georgia. We flew into Florida and celebrated an early Christmas with my family before heading up to Georgia for the wedding at a stunning hunting lodge (with stunning taxidermy). The whole wedding weekend was magical and transportive, an interlude in a world away from the last year. I found myself unexpectedly sorrowful on our departure—whereas much of 2024 didn’t quite go my way, I felt (and feel) that my family has grown a lot closer over the last year in a way that’s surprised and touched me.

  

  We had only a couple of days back home before dad and his partner showed up in the UK to visit for a few days. We spent most of the time in the pub, but managed to get out for Christmas dinner with Sam’s family and for a walk up Roseberry Topping on what turned out to be the capstone of a spectacular week, weather-wise (and experience-wise).

  And so it goes

  It’s a dark December night once again. The years are passing with increasing speed, and I feel I’m struggling to keep hold of them. I find myself looking back on the way I’ve changed, the differences I’ve made, the people I’ve impacted, in a way that I didn’t think I would until I was in my 40s, at least. These questions of, How have I changed? or Whose lives have I touched? or What difference have I made in the world? are middle-aged person questions—I'm not middle-aged yet, right? The past year wasn’t bad—but the prospect of another string of years like this one, another forty or so, doesn’t excite me. I feel that something needs to change in 2025.

  

  Previously: 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023

  Year in Review

• ---

  Sunday, 31 Dec 2023 11:58 pm

  2023

  In my review of 2022, I gave a whole section to the downtime that I spent "scrolling on algorithmically-generated feeds", kicking myself gently for wasting time. I think I called it "futzing". Late in the year, though, my main algorithmically-generated feed (viz Twitter) got nuked and I stopped using it. I joined Mastodon and I enjoy catching up with the meta at intervals, but my interest in the latest & greatest in web browser technology seems to have evaporated with my Twitter usage.

  The result being that 2023 has been a very busy year.

  

  Writing

  Let's start off with this blog itself. I wrote 117 entries—posts, book reports, walks/runs. I struggled, last year, with the direction to take this blog; did I want to be a poster of tech takes? Did I have anything worthwhile to say about design? Did I just want to share fun stuff I found on the web (and with whom)?

  I decided that I was mostly writing for myself and resolved to write down just what's going on with me. I'm egregiously forgetful, so I've turned this website into a sort of light public journal, jotting down things that I've done, things I've thought about more than a couple times, things too good to forget.

  I dropped the monthly review format early in the year in favour of shorter, more frequent posts—if I'd have included an event in a monthly or weekly review, I write an independent post instead. The beginning of the year was also a bit lighter on writing, mostly because...

  I broke my hand

  ...on Collier Law, early in March, on some ice. This was a pain. I do a very poor job of appreciating quite how well by body works most of the time, but I hope that I do a slightly less poor job now that I've been deprived of my right hand for a month. I wrote about the nitty-gritty, picking at the keys with my free index finger, back in March.

  After the cast came off, I had quite a bit of pain and stiffness in my hand, but I was told I'd healed well and could get back to regular activities with a bit of care and regular stretching. Other than a couple of ill-advised handshakes, the rest of the year has passed without incident.

  Outdoors

  Hand newly freed, I laced my running shoes back up and Got Serious. After reading What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Murakami at the end of last year, I started running with purpose, which is to say, more frequently. Something about it clicked with me this time (as opposed to all of the other times I tried to start running Seriously), and I've been running pretty consistently ever since.

  

  I joined a running club midsummer to help meet other folks who run, and it's been a pretty much unalloyed success. Running with others is tremendously motivating. The performance boost you get while running a race is present, to a degree, when you're just running at a track with 20 other people.

  It's not all track sessions and group headtorch runs, though: being involved in a club has encouraged me to get out for races a little bit more often, as well. I'm still solidly midpack, but my position at the North East Harrier League cross-country fixtures has been slowly improving. I'm faster than I was this time last year, which is progress.

  Beyond running, I completed two sprint triathlons, which sorta counts towards this year's goal of completing an Olympic-length one. I hadn't been properly swimming in years before training, but I got up to speed with open water quickly enough and finished both in respectable, if not stellar, times.

  

  I also spent plenty of time on my bicycle, buying a secondhand touring bike to ride the C2C from Whitehaven on the west coast to Tynemouth on the east with a buddy of mine. Not much riding in the latter part of the year, though, which feels like a shame. I'll have to turn that around in 2024.

  Travel

  Triathlon training was punctuated by a short trip back to the United States for a good friend's wedding in South Carolina, and Sam and I took the opportunity to do a bit of a tour of the southeast and to visit family in Florida. The wedding was beautiful and it was fantastic to spend time with old friends; I'm always heartened by how quickly we can fall back into step with people we haven't seen for years. What a gift to be able to see family twice in one year, as well—although I'd forgotten quite how hot it can get over there, even in May. As a bonus, Sam and I got to see big stretches of the Georgian interior, staying at a couple of campsites and driving miles and miles of old highways. What a funky part of the world.

  Other highlights from earlier in the year: a couple of weekends spent with Ghyll and friends up at Polmood, finally climbing down into the Devil's Beef Tub wherein we found a rusty old overturned VW van from a road incident years and years ago; a visit to Alton Towers on a slightly damp day off work in September.

  After I'd gotten the triathlons over & done with, we thought it was time for a bit of a break, so we took advantage of cheap flights after school got back underway for a trip to Stockholm. I wrote plenty about it elsewhere on the blog, but my takeaway is that Sweden's just a terrific country. I'd like to go back.

  Ghyll

  On return our return from Sweden, we brought Ghyll in for his appointment to be fixed, and in the veterinarian's waiting room he clipped his tail on something and split it open. Blood everywhere. The vets informed us that, being the cheery, tail-waggy kind of dog that he is, it was unlikely to heal; the advised procedure was to amputate the injured bit and stitch up the remaining like 85% of his tail.

  This worked well—until it didn't: Ghyll tore off the bandage and pulled out his sutures, and had to be brought back to the vet to amputate most of the rest of his tail.

  

  Having most of your tail removed is a traumatising experience for a dog, and Ghyll didn't take it very well. He kept tearing his bandages off and trying to get at it; he'd tear it up, spinning and spinning for hours trying to reach it. He was put on a pretty tough course of medication to help it heal and ease the pain; meanwhile, Sam and I (mostly Sam) traded off sleeping downstairs to prevent him from chewing on it through the night. It was an exhausting ordeal.

  By and by, though, it got better; he's generally back to his old self now. He sleeps through the night without us, he doesn't chase his tail (too much), he bounds about and gets into mischief. He still makes fast friends at doggy daycare. He's maybe a bit too free with climbing on people for affection and attention, and his recall is gone: calling his name prompts him to look up, take note, and wander off. But he's a good dog.

  

  At home

  Ghyll's recovery coincided with the boiler conking out just as the weather started to turn cold. Given that it's the time of year when boilers conk out across the country, we could only get someone in to mend the situation after a week or so. The country conveniently suffered a cold snap during that very week—so we were chilly indeed, overcoming only by sheer grit and the combined warmth of three or four sweaters worn simultaneously.

  We'd originally wanted to have an electric boiler installed, but the cost of electricity is still prohibitive. It feels quaintly backwards to have a new gas boiler installed instead—but it heats up water and it doesn't break the bank, and we try to use it judiciously.

  Elsewhere in the house, we had new oak doors installed, and we've torn out the downstairs bathroom for a proper DIY makeover. That's, uh, a work in progress.

  Loss

  Late in the year, Sam's grandma Alwyn died. She'd been ill for for some time, and at nearly 94 years old had seen more of the world go by than almost anyone who ever lived. She was the head of the family and a pillar of the church at St. Luke's, and she's missed every day.

  Stray observations

  Here's a handful of other things that happened this year but that don't deserve their own sections:

  • Vroom vroom | Cars came & went: we traded our Volvo C30 for a much more practical Skoda Fabia station wagon in February: it's been great but it needs a brake service. Midyear Sam decided that it was becoming impractical to keep her Renault Clio around any longer, as rust ate it from various corners; this was an emotional one as it was her first car and a source of solace in difficult times. She'd wanted a classic car for a while, so late in the year we bought an old Porsche 924 for a reasonable price; it's been an exciting car to drive but requires a certain amount of finessing given its age.
  • Sleep | In my 20s, I could get by on six or seven hours of sleep a night. I'd yawn through the day but I'd be fundamentally OK. Since the pandemic, though, I've struggled to get myself out of bed after less than 8 uninterrupted hours, ideally closer to 9. I don't know how much of this is attributable to age, how much to overextending myself, how much to general malaise. I'm trying not to think too much about it, but the concept of missing like an extra 8 hours of wakefulness each week weighs on me a tiny bit.
  • The year of AI | In 2023 people got very into the idea of AI, and some people even got it to do useful stuff. I did neither, though I'm dimly interested in how it all works. I watched a couple of Andrej Karpathy videos about gradient descent, I followed half a guide to turning your iMessage history into a group chatbot, I installed Whisper locally and had it transcribe a couple of voice memos. The problems I have regularly, unfortunately, don't seem to overlap with the problems that AI purports to solve.
  • Spending | We've been unreasonably spendy since Sam got a job in the last third of the year. I think it's probably the giddiness of having bigger numbers in our current account—but it's still something we'd like to rein in.
  • Chess | I am, somewhat famously, remarkably bad at chess. But I've always been interested in it; I like how the game demands total focus. Watching Sebastian Lague's chess programming tournament at the end of the year rekindled my desire to actually play, so I've got a Lichess account and an ELO that can, in very literal sense, only go up.

  

  

  Reading

  I'm three for three in achieving reading goals: 20 in 2021, 26 in 2022, and 36 in 2023. I started tracking my reading on Goodreads this year in an undirected attempt to introduce a social aspect to reading, but I'm not sure whether I've gotten anything out of it. Probably not going to post over there in 2024. It's just overhead.

  After discovering that my reading list for 2022 was egregiously weighted in favour of men, I tried to do a better job balancing things out this year. Of this year's 36 books, 19 were written by women—which is better! Not best, but better than last year. 11 were nonfiction, 26 fiction. I don't know if I'm bothered too much about that balance.

  Some standouts, in no particular order:

  • The Idiot and Either/Or by Elif Batuman | A fantastic look into the head of the terminally self-aware as she discovers what kind of person she wants to be during her first couple years at Harvard University.
  • JR by William Gaddis | Dense and experimental but never uninteresting, life and information coming at you hard and fast, unpredictably apt in the age of the internet.
  • Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin | A book about video games for people who don't play video games, about love in a nontraditional sense, about work and play and making stuff.
  • U.S.A. by John Dos Passos | Maybe the longest book I've ever read, a tremendously dense and politically charged account of the state of the USA in the years leading up to, during, and after WWI. Too bad about Dos Passos's politics later in life.
  • Ducks by Kate Beaton | An account of Kate Beaton's stint of work in the oilfields of central Canada, about the toll that working on the sands takes on people—especially women. Soul-crushing but leavened with Beaton's characteristic awkward humour. Probably the best book I read all year.

  Work

  I used to write a lot about work, but I don't anymore. Partly it's because I feel a duty not to reveal too much about the infrastructure underpinning public health in the UK, and partly it's because it's a job, and the changes it effects in the world are nearly-imperceptible, and there are countless other people doing the same thing, and there's just not that much to say.

  And partly it's because I've sort of gone off the constant grind, gone off trying to keep up with the latest developments in the browser. In retrospect, getting up to speed with programming was exhausting: constantly listening to podcasts or running tutorials or lurking on Twitter or sifting through repositories on GitHub was a lot. Leaving Twitter helped make a clean break, and if there's one thing that I've learned about trends on the web, it's that long-term, responsible approaches to building for the web don't leave people behind. I can catch up once a year and still build performant, accessible websites.

  

  So here we are

  It's the last day of the year. It's dark outside; it's been dark outside for hours. We spent the day tiling in the kitchen; tomorrow we'll apply grout and caulk. Sam's been downstairs working on the bathroom. The rain's stopped briefly; it rains pretty much constantly at this time of year.

  I've decided not to set any goals or resolutions this year. I'll come up with goals as I go, and I'll probably write about them proudly at the end of next year. Ghyll needs to be taken for a walk so I'm going to go get my headlamp and my jacket and Sam and I will go take him down the beach or something. See you in 2024.

  

  Year in Review

• ---

  Saturday, 31 Dec 2022 8:56 pm

  2022

  Feeling
  

  The first half of the year went pretty well! Coming into the summer I was feeling pretty positive about myself and had a bit of a self-improvement plan. I was regularly exercising, had gotten back together with a couple of friends that I'd lost touch with over the pandemic, and had picked up my old guitar after years of neglect. I was writing regularly on my blog, like I'd wanted to, and I was getting back into cycling.

  The second half of the year, however, has been an exercise in trying to manage my anxiety in ways that, while extremely disruptive personally, sound very boring when written down.

  A lot of the new pain came down to getting a dog—a purchase and an adoption of new responsibilities that I just wasn't ready for. But the dog—who is called Ghyll, and about whom you've doubtless heard before—was mostly just a locus for a lot of damaging habits and ways of thinking that I needed to deal with, and still do. But enough's been written about depression and anxiety without needing me to add to it.

  Anyway, speaking of Ghyll...

  Ghyll

  Ghyll has been a trial. We'd been originally advised to get a more laid-back dog, but we bucked the advice and got a pup that's equal parts energy (a pointer) and intellect (a poodle). Combine that with his puppy restlessness and it's been a recipe for Total Exhaustion. He needs attention almost 100% of the time, which leaves very little time for anything else.

  He's certainly Sam's dog more than he is mine: he whines when she leaves the room and panics when she wanders off while we're out on a walk. He crawls into her lap while she's sitting on the sofa and follows her around the house while we do chores. I'm okay with that, and I think that we divide his training reasonably evenly at any rate.

  

  He's a fantastic little pup a lot of the time—and I have to remind myself, when he's at his most mischievous, that he is still just a pup. I know he'll come into his own as he ages, and the adventures we'll have together will be enough to fill up the server that this blog runs on many times over. Watch this space.

  Family

  Spent more time with family in 2022 than I had for a few years, come to think of it. Dad came round to the UK for a short visit around my birthday in May; we took him to Oxford, the Midlands, York, and Whitby on the long drive up to Wingate; and then for a couple of walks in the North York Moors. I loved being able to share the things we do on a regular basis with friends and family from outside of the UK: it's hard to keep front of mind while you're here but we do live in an interesting corner of the world. Sam and I also spent Christmas with family in Florida this year—more on that below.

  

  2022 wasn't all family reunions, though—in February my Grandma Sweet died, at 91; I went to Canada to be with my mom and my sister for a few days. Travelling with COVID restrictions was tough but I was so glad to be able to be with them, to see my mom for the first time since Sam & my wedding in 2019. And then in December, my Uncle Jean died at 63—way before his time. He'd been fighting cancer for about a year and died surrounded by family. It's been said before and it'll be said again: fuck cancer.

  Downtime

  I spent a lot of time futzing around this year. Which by futzing I mean that whole days and weeks went by totally meaninglessly.

  I don't mean to say unproductively: I do spend a lot of unproductive time meaningfully. Watching YouTube, or walking in nature, or even reading, if you look at it a certain way, could be construed as unproductive time spent. But all of these things have served a meaningful purpose, and I don't intend on cutting them out of my life in 2023.

  Infinite scrolling on algorithmically-generated feeds, however: neither meaningful nor productive. Sitting around, waiting for something to happen: ditto. Staying up late, enviously surfing Reddit pricing up goods I have no need for: double-ditto. I need to make a conscious effort to cut this sort of crap out of my life, and it's going to be harder than I think I know, right now, for two reasons:

  1. it's not a quantitative goal: as in, I can't effectively measure how much wasteful time I spent—not without signing up for more responsibilities—and
  2. it's going to take discipline—which isn't to say endurance. I'm going to have to recognise when I've run out of willpower or energy or cheer and reliably fall back to those activities that help lift me back up (and I'm going to have to figure out what those activities are in the first place!).

  Trips

  

  During my professional downtime, we were able to take a couple of trips out of the country this year:

  • When my grandma died in February I went over to Cambridge, Ontario, to be with my mom and sister for a few days. Not a pleasant start to the year but I was glad to be able to be with family, rather than halfway around the world.
  • We went to Riga, Latvia in June for a long weekend. It was a terrific break from the responsibilities of daily life and a perfect opportunity to get a bit of sun during the first European heatwave. We travelled out of the city a couple of times, learned about the social and political history of Latvia, and drank of a ton of Mežpils.
  • We travelled back to Florida for Christmas to visit family. Historically whenever I've gone back to Florida, I wind up just sitting around, not doing much, watching commercials on TV (and the few minutes of interstitial news), and head home somehow more tired than I left. This time, we made a point of getting out out of the house, going on a boat ride, running with my sister, visiting Paynes Prairie, eating out in Little Havana, and ogling the taxidermy at Bass Pro Shops. I came back feeling energised and ready to take on the challenge of 2023: not a bad return!
  • I went down to London with the folks from Creator for State of the Browser in October: my first tech conference ever! It lived up to expectations: I got to meet a couple of heroes, saw a bunch of fantastic talks, and caught up with friends I hadn't spoken to in a while. Looking forward to another conference next year (if I can afford it).

  Motorbike

  After watching a bunch of YouTube videos about wrenching on motorbikes at the end of last year, we decided to get into riding this year. Did our Compulsory Basic Training, which allows us to ride bikes up to 125cc; drove up to Scotland for a really competitively-priced Yamaha YBR and rode the gauntlet through the Scottish Borders on an absolutely massive trip back home to County Durham.

  

  As the days began to darken in the last quarter of the year, the motorbike was almost stolen from an Asda car park; and the following month, I came off the bike a couple miles from home. The bike seems to have shrugged off the accident well, but I was pretty sore afterwards, and I haven't ridden it since then.

  I'm looking forward to getting back onto the bike as the days lengthen and dry up though; I'd like to take the bike out to the hills and get really comfortable with the limits in corners. Next step beyond that is to get back out for some lessons and get my Big Boy Motorcycle Licence (and a Big Boy Motorcycle to match).

  Books

  At the end of 2021, I set myself a goal of reading 25 books this year—which I've accomplished as of 5 December. I'm pretty pleased with that! The list has been heavily skewed towards fiction, which I think I'm okay with—while there's plenty of worthy nonfiction, I read enough thought-pieces online without also having to wade through a world of commercially-published thought-pieces.

  (As an added bonus, a lot of older fiction can be had for pretty reasonable prices secondhand!)

  I'm awful at reading books as they come out, so my highlights of the year are all older books that I only just caught up on:

  • The World According to Garp was charming and whimsical without skimping on the moral backbone, like a movie Wes Anderson wishes he could make.
  • Lincoln in the Bardo came in the same vein: comedic without sacrificing the emotional core; a little experimental but without getting in the way, formally.
  • Austerlitz is one of those monoliths that earns its weight, encompassing so much of the world, so much human experience, that it's almost a world unto itself.

  I did struggle with the social element around reading—specifically, my lack of it. Don't get me wrong: books are worthy on their own merits! The brightest minds in the canon of literature really oughta be company enough. But I'd have liked, at least, to talk to someone about what I read, or to receive recommendations from someone, rather than digging through lists online for what to read next. In the closing days of the year I've gone back to Goodreads; it hasn't changed much in the few years since I last visited but appears to be as active as ever. I'm going to try to syndicate reviews over there in 2023.

  In the spirit of reading five more books each ensuing year, I'm going to aim for 30 books in 2023. Maybe that's a bit lofty but I like a challenge. I might try to balance out the fiction with the nonfiction, but I'm not going to make any promises.

  Writing

  At the end of 2021, I decided to try writing less, but more often, using the quality through quantity approach. It's been going well! In 2022, I wrote 95 Stream entries: most of them related to the web but a handful addressing idle thoughts on tech or design or social media.

  While I'm satisfied with the quantity approach, I'm not sure if I've quite reached quality yet. I think this is probably a product of not quite knowing what quality looks like; while I read a bunch of fiction, I don't think I was particularly taken by any of the authors' voices. Robert Heaton is my standard for Good Writing at the minute—specifically his series on being a parent—but whenever I try to mimic his calm, calculated style I wind up sounding depressed and haunted.

  I'm also not quite sold on what I've been writing about. Šime Vidas added me to his big ol .opml of web dev feeds sometime this year so I've felt the need to keep the site at least nominally web dev-related—but the primary purpose of this site is to keep track of what I've been doing and thinking. I don't have much of a readership. So I think in 2023 I'm going to try and focus more on writing down things that have happened to me, rather than stupid stuff that I don't care about, like the next iPhone.

  

  Music

  I'm not a big fan of automatically-compiled end-of-year music lists like Spotify Wrapped since number of plays doesn't tell the whole picture. My most played song, album, and artist were all Coheed and Cambria this year—not because Vaxis II was my favourite album, but because I spent a lot of the year in a state of despondent emotional fragility and I needed something predictable and thoughtless that I could play on repeat.

  So here are my real top albums of the year, in no particular order:

  • Sometimes, Forever by Soccer Mommy - Sophia Allison has such a great way of reinterpreting musical themes from the 90s and putting a sort of raw 2020s emotional spin on them, and this is her best work yet.
  • Shadow Work by Mammal Hands - Exactly the same vibe as the piano music that plays in Build mode on the original Sims game. This isn't meant as a criticism!
  • Hygiene by Drug Church - Absolutely full sound, from the guitars to the vocals to the wry lyrics to the production, just overall really masterfully done rock music.
  • Drive My Car Soundtrack by Eiko Ishibashi - Most soundtracks don't stand on their own, but jazz musician Eiko Ishibashi does such a wonderful job of capturing a sort of feeling at turns light and troubled, engaged and relaxed.
  • Virga I & Virga II by Eluvium - I've been listening to Eluvium since forever and I love his return to massive-sounding breathy compositions, like leviathans in the fog, always a totally obliterating listen.
  • Vaxis II by Coheed & Cambria - Okay fine I'll put them on the list. It's alright that Claudio Sanchez is indulging in his more pop sensibilities, and there are a few bangers here musically—but the lyrics are so god-awful and trite that I usually have to turn it off after only a couple of songs.

  Making music

  I didn't do that at all this year! But I thought about it enough that I'd like to try it next year. I'm not going to make any goals around this—if it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen.

  I spent a lot of this year noodling around on my electric guitar, learning songs I like and half-heartedly following along with tutorials I've found online, re-growing the calluses on the fingertips of my left hand and duly picking them off. But I don't feel like a guitarist, and I certainly don't tell people that I can play guitar (this blog notwithstanding). But I'd like to get a bit more serious about playing and creating stuff. A bit.

  Exercise

  We kicked off the year really well, with a few weekend trips out to the Lake District to bag Trail 100s and Wainwrights in the cold and the rain and the occasional weak sunlight. In February, however, Storm Eunice nearly blew us off the shoulder of Mynydd Drws-y-Coed in northwestern Wales and we decided to shelf the peak-bagging until finer weather returned.

  In the meantime, I did the Yorkshire Three Peaks challenge in ten and a half hours—not bad, but not great either. As the summer rose we got back into walking the Weardale Way, traversing most of the route through central County Durham, and stopping within 20 kilometers or so of the coast, where the Way ends at the outlet of the River Wear in Sunderland. Maybe not the most urgent pace, considering that we started the Way just before the pandemic got under way, but we'll get there eventually.

  Trail 100s

  Last year I set a goal of climbing at least five Trail 100s—and I climbed six, all within the first few months of the year. Ghyll's put a bit of the ol kibosh on climbing the 100 most dramatic crags in the United Kingdom, but we're hopeful to get back on the list in 2023.

  Here are the ones that we climbed:

  • Cat Bells
  • Yewbarrow
  • Helm Crag
  • Wetherlam
  • Coniston Old Man
  • Ingleborough (part of the Yorkshire Three Peaks)

  

  Cycling

  As a result of my dad bringing my trusty Schwinn over from the States in May, 2022 was the year I got back into cycling.

  I did a bit of cycling back in Japan—long-distance stuff that I hadn't really trained for but which I could brute-force with youth and verve—but didn't do much riding while living in Florida (outside of commuting) and almost none at all since falling off my bike in 2017.

  

  For that reason, this year was really about building my confidence back up across a few rides around East Durham and Northumberland. I'm getting back to terms with riding amid traffic, with riding long distances, with riding under load (and with riding into the brutal British wind). But I've caught the cycling bug and I'm ready to undertake a bigger challenge next year.

  Goal-setting

  I did a decent job of accomplishing the informal goals I set for myself at the beginning of 2022:

  • Climb 5 Trail 100 mountains. We climbed 5 in the first few weeks of 2022, and then none thereafter.
  • Read 25 books. I read 26, at last count, leaning generally towards fiction.
  • Write more on the blog. I wrote 95 short entries on the Stream, a monthly review each month (except December—I'll have to come back for that one), a short review of every book I read, and a quick overview of the walks as well. How's that for CoNtEnT?

  I also wrote that I wanted to take a "critical look at the way that I self-identify." I didn't do that at all. Maybe it's just that I had other things on my mind; maybe the issue of self-identification wasn't as pressing to me throughout the year as it was in December 2021. But I don't think that I particularly need to put myself in a box right now.

  Anyway, in the interest of holding myself accountable a year from now, here's a quick list of goals for 2023:

  • Read 30 books (5 more than last year)
  • Participate in an Olympic triathlon, and finish in a competitive time (what a "competitive time" means is discretionary)
  • Ride the Coast 2 Coast cycleway
  • Go on 3 trips outside of the country
  • Get my full motorbike licence

  And that's about it

  I don't think that I wrung 2022 dry, so to speak, but I think I've left it pretty parched. I'm certainly on firmer ground emotionally, and Ghyll's growing up very fast. I think I'm ready to take on some more serious challenges in 2023—although I have to remind myself not to take things too seriously. Looking forward to what's in store.

  

  Year in Review

• ---

  Saturday, 1 Jan 2022 10:02 pm

  2021

  2021 was a weird one: the year that wasn’t.

  Coming into 2021, I had a bunch of expectations about things that I wanted to do: goals I wanted to accomplish, people I wanted to see, places I wanted to go. Sam’s grandma had just gotten the vaccine, we were kicking COVID to the kerb, and picking up where we left off at the end of 2019.

  ...None of which actually came about. And based on what I've written below, 2022 is going to be all about recalibrating expectations. Didn't do half of what I set out to do last year; held myself to maybe too high a standard. In the last third of the year (or so), I ran into some real emotional headwinds, bringing what progress I had been making to a standstill.

  I worked that sense of momentum back up in the fading days of 2021, but 2022 is going to be all about picking battles, making priorities (& more importantly, sticking to em), and building small, accomplishable routines.

  Reading

  At the end of last year, I aimed to read 20 books—and I did, just barely, eking out 3 books in December after not finishing a single one for the 2 months prior. I think that’s a decent showing.

  Was keeping track of what I read and what I thought it using oku.club in the same way that I use Letterboxd: mostly as a repository for quick, low-stakes reviews directly in the aftermath of finishing.

  But I haven’t been 100% satisfied with Oku; it’s a lovely application and it’s clear that it’s made by a group of people who love reading very much, but it somehow lacks a crucial ingredient to keep me coming back.

  

  Instead, I’ve decided to put any publishable writing that doesn’t belong anywhere else into CraftCMS (including this blog). That means that book reviews are going into CraftCMS as well. I’m including as much data about each book as I think is relevant. None of it is public at the moment, but I’m going to start experimenting with ways to visualise my reading data—even if it’s just putting it in a sortable list to begin with.

  I also took some more detailed notes on books that I read near the beginning of the year, but abandoned it after a few months. I don't know why. I put a lot of pressure on myself when I write, and rarely like what I write enough to come back and read it again since I tell myself I probably won't like it. Writing feels like awfully high stakes, which is one of the reasons I'm trying to de-big-deal-ify it in 2022.

  At any rate, I’m going to up the reading goal to 25 books in 2022. Progressive loading n all that.

  Writing

  There's a good variety of writing on the blog since I wrote the 2020 post last year, but I only managed 16 posts on the blog this year. Of those, 12 were written before Canada Day, which seems a bit of a shame.

  I like writing in Markdown—and my favourite editors are Markdown editors—but I've found that keeping blog posts in .mdx files within my blog's repo has just slightly too much friction for me. For that reason, I've come back around to a CMS—specifically, CraftCMS, for its slick dashboard and editing experience. It could have just as easily been WordPress and Advanced Custom Fields, but I prefer the way that Craft's code is structured, even if I'm not super familiar with the Yii framework, and its database structure is wonky as all get-go.

  

  Now that I've got my CMS just the way I like it, I'd like to write more frequently. Fewer words per posts, but more posts. To that end, I’ve started the Stream for shorter little bits that I want to hold on to long-term, but aren't worth writing out a whole blog post about. I recognise my writing has worsened a bit since I was publishing 1000 words weekly for Everything You Have Heard Is True, but I'm hoping to get to quality through quantity in 2022—a concept I heard about first on Shop Talk Show but which makes a lot of sense.

  Fitness

  Had a goal of running 600km this year and didn't come anywhere near that. I don't know why I set that goal. I had a serious verve for running early last year, and I ran pretty consistently through February or so. But in late February I hurt my knee with all the running and didn't take mending it seriously until the beginning of December. Got to the point where I was having lots of trouble getting down stairs.

  I just don't seem to bounce back as quickly anymore. I guess that's a 30s thing. I've gotten to the point where I feel old—heck, I'm the oldest I've ever been in my life!—but I realise that to the majority of folks I'm still young, and I should be taking care of my body while it's still effectively in one piece.

  

  Been going to the gym regularly, too, which means a lot, even if I'm not particularly beefy or anything. It's hard to keep up with some days, but it helps to keep the expectations low so long as I show up. Showing up is 80%, &c.

  Outdoors

  After finishing the Cleveland Way at the end of last year, we started the Weardale Way on a very snowy day in January 2021. Over the first half of the year we walked about half of it. My favourite part was watching the lambs grow up once the weather started to warm up. Ran out of steam about halfway through and haven’t done any more of it for a while—so it’d be nice to knock out the rest of it and get started on our next long-distance trail.

  

  Did the Esk Valley Walk and then the St. Cuthbert’s Way in quick succession and it was great! Only wild camped one night, which was maybe coddling ourselves a bit.

  Bothied overnight only once, which wasn’t a great record.

  Loosy-goosy outdoors goals for 2022 include: bothying for a few nights in a row; walking another long-distance route or two (the West Highland Way or Pennine Way if we’re feeling particularly ambitious); bagging at some more (5 or so?) of the Trail 100.

  Hobbies

  Came up a little bit short on the hobbies front this year. Is reading a hobby? I’ve picked it back up at the end of the year, but from August-November I don’t think I read a single book. Watching movies is definitely a hobby, and I did pretty well on that front—insofar as watching movies is something that you can do well at.

  I want to change up my approach to hobbies—or at least, to non-work—in 2022. Brad Frost shared an article from The Atlantic about how modern professionals identify with their work late in the year, and I saw a lot of myself in it. I also spotted this Reddit thread just the other day (well into 2022) about IT/software jobs being/not being cakewalk dreamlands. I think what makes software developers so stressed out is that we tend to identify wholly and inextricably with our jobs: not only do I do software development for work, but I also do software development outside of work.Which makes it difficult to partition failure at work (even if it’s just failure to live up to our own high expectations) from failures of the self—which leads to burnout.

  Which is all to say that I want to try and take a step back from identifying so strongly with my software development work. I’ll probably struggle with it—with feeling like others are jetting off ahead of me in terms of expertise—but it’ll be a good star to navigate by.

  Work

  I started 2021 about 2 months into a new job with Komodo in Newcastle. I spent the beginning of the year finding my feet and figuring out my place within the larger agency structure; I hadn’t worked in a team of more than 2 developers and there was a learning curve not only to the tech stack but to working well with other people. I spent most of the year getting better at pull requests and code review, learning how to give and receive feedback, figuring out how to make architectural decisions. Spent a lot of time with the Laravel documentation. Went to the Komodo offices and wrote code in the same room as my coworkers for the first time in forever. Made friends at work and (hopefully) made a bit of a difference from a like professional perspective as well.

  Late in the year I applied for a developer position at NHS Digital. I didn’t expect anything to come of it but after a couple of interview rounds they offered me the job—which I took. So it was back onto the learning curve with me for the last three months of the year. I don’t know if the curve has been steeper at the NHS or whether I’m just getting a little bit more strict with myself in terms of timescales for productivity. I feel less productive at the 3-month point here, at NHS Digital, than I did after 3 months at Komodo. It’s probably just questions of scale—everyone at the NHS has been positive and supportive and helpful, so I’m probably on the right track.

  Side projects

  Speaking of not living/breathing software development outside of working hours, I didn’t commit a ton of energy to side projects this year. That’s not to say that I didn’t do anything:

  • Beefed up the Feeler sentiment analysis project, it's a little bit nicer to use now.
  • Read-fast: Got started on a project for reading epubs online but sort of got burnt out on it and didn't finish it, but the basic idea is that it would allow you to speed read epubs on your computer. It works well for most epubs but I’ve had some trouble with navigating between chapters on others.
  • Pacific: Got started on a note-taking app using Outline's rich markdown editor and a couple of stylistic cues from Clover; used it for a few months but didn't take it much further. It's Go on the backend & is very snappy if I do say so myself.
  • Got started on moving the blog over to CraftCMS on the backend in the pursuit of that more posts, fewer words per post thing I talked about above. I feel weirdly giddy about it. I don't think I've done any development that's gotten me really excited for a good little while now.

  Goals

  I don’t want to set any hard-and-fast goals this year, in light of the spectacular failure at fulfilling last year’s goals. But it’s always worth having a bit of a think about where I’d like to be in 12 months.

  I’d like to continue to make little one-off projects to test new technologies in 2022, but my main focus this year is going to be content. I dislike the word content for the same reason that I dislike the term Human Resources—it feels like a commodification of something that’s supposed to be meaningful in and of itself—but I think it’s generic enough to represent what I want to produce.

  On the other side, I want to take a critical look at the way that I self-identify. Lots of people are software developers firstand software developers only, and I really respect that, but I don’t know if that’s what I want for myself. Maybe it is. I’ve been pretty full-bore on the software development train for the past few years and maybe it’s time to take a step back and have a think about it. No goals here.

  

  See you in 2023!

  Year in Review

• ---

  Thursday, 31 Dec 2020 8:00 pm

  2020

  You already know how 2020 went. The world's been falling apart, and the poor schmucks on the street are holding it together at the fraying seams while the powerful take the credit on television. It's a sorry state of affairs and I think that's all I want to say about that.
  

  This is what else happened on the Charles front over the course of the last year.

  Hobbies

  Sam and I walked the whole Cleveland Way, a 175-kilometer walking trail around the North York Moors.

  

  We walked it over the course of a series of day hikes, most of which I've written quick guides for (though I haven't posted them on the blog). Was my first experience with walking a long-distance trail and I've been bitten by the bug. The Weardale Way is coming up next.

  Career

  I have a bad habit of conflating my work life with my actual, full, whole life, and from that standpoint, the biggest thing that happened this year was that I changed jobs.

  The job I left: I'd worked for Creator since I moved here in 2017. It was my first job in this country, which meant quite a good deal; and at that point I was still a novice web developer. The position was very generalist and gave me the opportunity to take responsibility for building the whole stack that a website gets built on. That sounds like a sentence that belongs on a CV, but that's really how it worked. Leaving the job was probably the toughest professional decision I've had to make, and certainly the toughest I've had to make since moving here.

  The job I took: I took a software engineer position at Komodo in Newcastle. It's a little bit more focused, a little bit more structured than Creator was, which I think is what I need right now. The support that comes with a larger team is invaluable, too. I think that at the moment I do my best work with a pair of headphones on and my Slack notifications disabled, but working in a small team on a large project allows me to work on my interpersonal, organisational skills. And the onboarding system was world-class; I don't expect that Google or Basecamp could do any better at getting a remote worker up to speed.

  Couple of other thoughts

  I think that the working-from-home scenario has generated enough tech-guy navel-gazing over the past 10 months or so, but here's my quick personal takeaway:

  I'm not working from home: I'm living at work. Having my work constantly accessible to me, in any part of my house, makes it extremely difficult to shut off.

  Building 'work culture' is simultaneously more difficult & more important when working from home.Without other employees around you, without a building to go to, without the work experience, it's very hard to build a work culture, meaning that changing jobs could just feel like moving from one project and one manager to another. Komodo's done a good job by keeping Slack active and hosting online events to make sure that the non-working-related banter keeps flowing.

  Side projects

  In the past year, I've gotten ever so slightly more serious about my side projects. I think there are two ways to approach side projects: as serious tools to increase your personal productivity, or as techno-gymnastic equipment on which you get to practice your ability. I've tended to treat my side projects more as the latter than the former; but maybe 2021 is the year I start really committing to them (or at least commit to coming up with better names for them).

  Jernl is by far the project with the most hours on it. It's a pretty simple journaling app, but where it sort of sits above your basic Laravel CRUD starter is that it comes with per-user data encryption. The idea here being that users should be able to write in their journal secure in the knowledge that no one but them can read their entries—not even the person who owns the database. I've written a little bit more about that here.

  Podcast Stats is an extremely work-in-progress application for tracking various statistics related to listening to podcasts. The idea here is that a user can feed it a bunch of podcasts that they listen to and keep track of which episodes they've listened to. Under the hood, it hits Apple's podcast search API and uses some clever caching tricks to keep requests to that API down. It provides some metrics relating to a user's listening habits at the moment, but I need to sit down and give it a proper think to make it useful. It also occupies a weird position as a podcast-related application without the ability to actually play podcasts. I don't think I want to go into the logistics of podcast playback but at the moment it means that I can't automate listening, which makes this whole thing a little bit more cumbersome than it needs to be. It'd be nice if Overcast had an API.

  GPX Editor is a very simple GPX file editor. Most of the other ones I've found online are either paid or offer some wacky feature set with an outdated UI. This one just lets you trim points from the start or end of your GPX file (usually because I forget to stop my watch after a hike) and download the new file.

  I also built a couple of smaller little bits on the side:

  • A super-small Go application for running sentiment analysis based on AFINN-111 a dataset of words and relative sentiments.
  • A Windows-XP-style screensaver of the word that wobbles back and forth.

  Learning & remembering stuff

  This year was the year that the Get Things Done (®®®®®®®) mentality sort of clicked for me. I've started treating my brain like RAM: really quick, impermanent storage for data that I need to hold on to short term. Everything else has started to go into applications on my computer. The key to all of this is a little ubiquitous spot that can receive raw thoughts at a moment's notice, with extremely little mental overhead. This could be anything from a little notebook your carry around with you, to a text file, to a dedicated application. In my case, I'm using Things, since it's available on my phone and computer, and can be called up with a clever little keybinding, no matter what I'm up to. I know Todoist has the same functionality, and is free and available in the browser as well.

  The nice thing about this is that it's allowed me to become significantly more productive with my actual, mushy, grey-matter, day-to-day brainium. Rather than trying to remember every discrete bit of information I come across during the day (people's birthdays, chores around the house, what I think of the book I'm reading, articles I want to read on the Internet), I've taught myself instead to write an extremely minimal note with the relevant information, to store away for later.

  Then, a few times a day I run through those notes and move them around to where they need to be. This might be Contacts.app or The Archive or this very blog. But that's the easy part.

  Goals

  I don't think I made any resolutions at the beginning of 2020. I remember that somewhere around the end of January, I decided to try and read 20 books, but I'm not sure I accomplished that, because for most of the year I wasn't taking very good notes about what I had and hadn't read. I know that I've read 4 books since about mid-November. I'm putting 20 books back on the list for 2021--and this time I'm going to keep good notes.

  I'm also going to try and run 600 km (a previous version of this post said 1000 km but that's just too far; Strava was adding up running and hiking). In 2019 I walked to work, but since working remotely, I've been doing significantly less--and I can feel it in my back. So alongside a stricter running schedule, I'm also going to try and get back into the gym a little more regularly.

  And that's basically it

  I don't have high hopes for 2021. I don't think there's much that any of us can do at this point but take things week to week—or day to day. That's how I intend to take the next year, and maybe 12 months from now we'll be in a better position than we're in right now.

  Year in Review