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Year in Review

Phil Chu
Author
Phil Chu
Making software since the 80s

I blogged for a while, so this seems like a good time to catch up. Here’s what happened this year.

  • Started converting my Jekyll (static site generation) sites hosted on Github Pages to self-hosted Hugo (also static site generation) sites. Like this one.

  • Started resuscitating my blog, last seen on ghost.io, right here.

  • After rebelling from Apple’s strict ecosystem for a few years with my Android phone (a Samsung Galaxy with a cracked screen and battery swelling problem), returned to their warm embrace by getting an iPhone 14 (and then immediately finding my Talk Dim Sum had problems on it).

  • After getting that iPhone, put my Android devices and the Flutter code for Talk Dim Sum in hibernation (but open source), and unpublished the app from Google Play, now focusing on the Swift version on the App Store (as much as I complain about the App Store, everything else is worse).

  • Also started charging for Talk Dim Sum instead of relying on in-app purchases. It doesn’t make that much either way, but free downloads tend to get whinier reviews (for some reason, Canadians and Europeans are the biggest complainers).

  • I more successfully disengaged from big tech robber baron Amazon (none of this fancy schmancy toxic social media stuff, just good old fashioned union-busting and worker mistreatment), actually managing to completely close my account(s) (the process resembled a rocket launch countdown, requiring closing of my AWS, Amazon author, Amazon appstore, and regular Amazon accounts in a certain order). Hey, if I need to use AWS again for a (paying) project, I can always create a new account.

  • Also bailed from itch.io. It’s a handy landing page for all your games and experiments, big and small, but the forum was driving me crazy with juvenile homophobic threads, and, as with the Amazon appstore, I was making some money, but not enough to make it a tough choice.

  • Wrote some scripts in Gauche, an implementation of Scheme, for JSON validation, link checking, copying files, sIttuff like that, plus a pi calculator for fun. It feels good to program in Lisp again.

  • Got back on the social media scene (I was ahead of the curve in abandoning twitter two years ago) with Hive Social, and when Hive went offline, I set up a Mastodon server, single-user for now (not the best way to get started on Mastodon, but my new year’s resolution is to do my server side stuff).

  • Recreated my resume in the JSON resume schema, got some practice with nodejs in the process.

  • I discovered a bunch of domain names that I let expire years ago and were immediately squatted upon and put up for auction became available again. So welcome back, hyperbowl3d.com, technicat.cafe, wholebraingames.com!

  • I resolved to do some more open source work, or at least have more of an open source presence, this year, and I think I succeeded, published more public repositories and contributed a few fixes.

  • Stopped blogging on ghost.io after an upgrade that broke all the links in my articles, and right after they charged the annual fee. Would have been nice to get a partial refund after I closed my account, but I guess that’s my monetary open source donation for the year. I was also using the blog as my technicat.com site, but switched that back to GitHub Pages.

So here we are.