Hello, reader.
This is my latest attempt at trying to write a wrap-up of my year, and also a last-ditch attempt to save this blog from all the tumbleweeds, dust and spiderwebs.
I’ll be writing about what I did this year, and this year it’s going to be a bit more structured and brief, atleast that’s what I’m aiming for. Please read this, and maybe give me some feedback!
Life
I’d say that life has been pretty okay. I’ve only got sick once towards the end of the year, and only for a few days.
memories.vixalien.com
I now host a simple website at [memories.vixalien.com], which you can visit to see a few pictures I took along this journey of life. I wish to improve it, possibly using the new Masonry layout in CSS, so that the images can display better, and faster. I might also try rewriting the site in Astro, to get rid of all the JavaScript. You can read more about how it works in this blog post I wrote earlier this year about river, the name of the metaframework it uses under the hood.
Budgeting
I started using YNAB to make budgets and track my personal expenses. I wanted to do it to reduce spending on luxuries instead of saving up, and I would say it paid a huge role. Actually tracking your expenses and knowing where your money goes is such an eye-opening experience, and you will quickly realise how much money you spend on the “small things” and on the “I need to take care of myself” expenses.
The next step of YNAB is actually budgeting, instead of just tracking expenses. To be totally frank with you, this is not my strongest suit, as I still adjust the budget from time to time to cover overspending in a wants category.
If you want to try out budgeting for yourself, I recommend you follow YNAB’s 4 rules:
- Give every dollar a job
- Embrace your true expenses
- Roll with the punches
- Age Your Money
You can learn more about the 4 rules with Hannah.
Social
Twitter/X
This year, I broke away from Twitter/X, as it has been… well, unusable recently. Instead, I switched to Mastodon, where you can follow me as @[email protected]. My fediverse client of choice is Phanpy on desktop and mobile linux, and Ice Cubes on my phone.
Instagram is probably the social media I use the most. I use it to sink a lot of my important hours watching reels, chatting with friends, and seldomly posting about pictures I take.
I took a brief break in the timeframe northern hemisphere folks call summer. We call that season the long dry season, because we are close to the equator, and our seasons are not influenced by the tilt of the earth, but rather due to the rainfall patterns. Anyway, during that break I accidentally deleted my account instead of disabling it, and made the shocking realisation a few days after the 30-day window Instagram gives you before deleting your account for good. This was bittersweet, but I made the (bad) decision to come back to Instagram again, as my life was honestly feeling very empty.
School
Uni
This year I also tried being more serious and attentive to classes, instead of the usual lazy and unproductive self I am. This work paid off very well, and I’m no longer in the lower ranks and actually make an effort to understand course concepts before moving on. If you are in University too, or doing something else, I would recommend you give it your all.
This came after a rather stoic realisation that I’m actually paying to be at University, and that when I’m not giving it my all, I’m actually losing time and money, and you know what they say: « Time wasted does not come back ». Surely enough, money spent does not come back either!!
Open Source
GNOME
I’ve been contributing to GNOME Projects for a while now, usually making bug reports, contributing to some libraries and applications (sometimes unsucessfully), writing some of my own GNOME apps, and more.
The year started of well, because I became a GNOME Foundation Member which is a very notable title (at least for me), and I feel like my contributions are now more valued.
I did apply and get accepted for Google Summer of Code in the… summer! It was quite a nice experience initially, since I got to work on Workbench, specifically adding TypeScript support to the app. I would implore you to check the application out if you want to make desktop applications (linux, mac, windows and android soon?) using GTK. The application allows you to write applications in many languages, including Rust, Vala, JavaScript, Python and now TypeScript. The application was developed by Sonny Piers, an amazing person, who was also my mentor for the Google Summer of Code intern, at least initially. I wrote about my experience in GSoC in a blog post you can also read, if you’re interested.
Things took a weird turn when Sonny was inexplicably and mysteriously banned from the GNOME Foundation, a sudden move that left me without a mentor for a while before they found a replacement. We (GNOME Contributors) have not yet got closure about the ban, even after we voted for new GNOME Foundation Board members, and this honestly led to the reduced trust and faith I now have in the GNOME Foundation. A side effect of this is that I’ve reduced my contributions to GNOME, as I’m no longer ecstatic to be a contributor anymore.
My Linux Apps
I write and maintain(ed) about 3 linux GTK applications, which have had limited contributions because of said previous issues with the GNOME Foundation.
The first, Sticky Notes, is basically on life support, as I didn’t really work on it much this year. Nevertheless, I’m still sending out maintenance updates, usually just updating the app for the new GNOME SDK, but never implementing any new features. I did plan and work on a new branch targetting markdown for a while, but never finalised it, and I don’t think I have the energy, will and time to work on it anymore. Sorry folks, maybe next year!
The second application I wrote, Muzika is now officially dead, as I wrote about in detail in a mastodon post. This is due to a lot of factors, but mainly due to YouTube breaking the current mechanism we used to log users in, and me not willing to play the cat and mouse game anymore. This is very unfortunate, as Muzika was basically my most famous application, and I’ve sunk a lot of hours into it, which made it sad to go. Anyway, we move!
The last, and newest application is called Decibels, and as you can probably guess from the name, is an audio (NOT music!!) player. It is a minimal application and requires minimal maintenance, which I like. I also have a co-maintainer (hey David!), which makes maintaining the app a breeze. It’s already a GNOME Circle (basically recognised as a good GNOME application), and it’s incubating to be part of the Core apps, which means you might soon have it installed by default in a GNOME installation!
Work
Karabo
It’s that time in University where you have to make a project, partly to get grades, and partly to validate all the hours you’ve sunk doing coursework or attending lectures.
My venture is called Karabo, and I’ve registered the company and website here: karabo.io. I will probably write about it more, as time goes on.