Weeknotes (2024 week 01)

First weeknotes post for 2024! Happy new year!

Looking back on 2023

Writing

I have published almost 40 posts last year. That’s almost as many posts as I published in the time period from 2014 to 2023. Coworking to write more does work.

I already had a quite active blog from 2005 to 2008 with a few posts after that; everything before 2014 was in german and mainly concerned with green politics and climate change. I’m still very interested in these topics but I don’t feel as if I have much to add to the conversation, even though it’s the more important issue.

Open Source

Not much changed here. I enjoy basically everything I do in open source land, and co-maintaining the Django Debug Toolbar with Tim is a joy.

I still wish that some of my projects had more impact in Django land, especially those who augment the Django administration interface to be a lightweight CMS which requires very little maintenance and work in the long run. I think it’s great that one of the core components, django-content-editor, hasn’t required a release in more than one year. It doesn’t have to be expanded because it just works. It would be great if there was a good way to distinguish between software which basically doesn’t require any updates and software which is abandoned.

The only project which doesn’t bring me much joy is django-mptt. Most people accept that there are no guarantees, but some people are just rude in the way in which they expect others to do the work. The first reaction was to return the blow and I’m glad that I didn’t give in to the temptation to do that. It’s basically never worth it to do that in writing.

Family

We had a good 2023 together and I’m very much looking forward to a just as good 2024.

Plans for 2024

I have bought a ticket for the DjangoCon Europe 2024 in Spain and I’m very much looking forward to that.

Maybe we’ll visit a music festival again this summer. After listening to a lot of metal music in the last ten or more years I rediscovered the dark side of D’n’B. Good times.

Advent of Code

I have finished the Advent of Code with some help from the Subreddit. Almost all of the puzzles were fun to think about. I didn’t have fun solving each and everyone of them, especially not the second part of a few of the later days. I feel good checking out solutions from other people in the subreddit, and maybe adding newly gained ideas to my code or even running someone else’s code 1:1 on my data after studying the algorithms used and hopefully learning something.

I had a good time and enjoyed shutting down the computer after that.

Releases

• FeinCMS 23.12: A few minor changes to the thumbnailing code. It’s always nice to hear from people who are still using this project.