2024 in review and plan for 2025

First of all, I wish you all a happy new year and great things for 2025, the most important one being having a good health! Like last year, let’s do a quick recap of last year and try to (slightly) plan for the new one.

2024 in a nutshell

On this blog

In 2024, I wrote 67 posts and it is by far the year I wrote the most! Last “record” was in 2017 with 29 posts… I’m both happily surprised and also not surprised at the same time, considering I decided to write on other topic than purely technical posts as I used too. I’m happy overall about this even though there was 2 quiet periods. In summary:

In April happened what I called my digital nightmare, where I lost all my data and access to my backups due to 2 hard drive failure in less than a week. It was a tough period but managed to get over it (even though I’m still sad about some pictures that were lost…). This and a sickness than vacation period ended up with a big drop of blog posts with only 1 between April and May. At least I had to learn how to retrieve access to many things, including VMs, Containers, Services and so on…

The second drop happened at the end of the year, when we adopted a new puppy in late October. And she took a lot of time and energy! She still does as her education is far from finished, but she doesn’t need to go out every hour or 2 like at the start to avoid cleaning after her. She is now 4 month and a half, 99% clean which is great. But without going into the details of her education and stuff, between the energy needed and a crazy amount of work in the last quarter of the year, writing on this blog became difficult. The Factorio 2.0 and space age extension did not help either… And still doesn’t as I’m still playing a lot (but also a lot less than what I would like :D).

2024 was a good blogging year in general, also the year I entered a bit more the IndieWeb by adding lots of markup for it, leading to creating for the first time my own theme for hugo: MinIndie.

Also reworked entirely my deployment workflow, massively over engineered but had lots of fun doing so, which is what matters (to me) anyway :).

One of the greatest thing about my blog and the indieweb in general is that I have far more interaction over emails than I ever did, which is great! Both from people reaching out to me or me reaching out to people more about their post. Was very nice and I hope this continue this year.

Gemini

Let’s be honnest, 2024 has not been the year of Gemini for me. I wrote 3 gemlog posts (monthly update for the first 3 months of the year), but the truth is: I almost never opened lagrange to check the gemini space this year. Writting these monthly posts was an attempt to change that and re-motivate me to be part of the gemini community, but at the end after the death of my laptop hard drive, I didn’t write anything, didn’t do the changes I wanted to on my capsule and basically let it as is without even publishing my blog post there anymore…

Maybe it is time to act on this and either drop Gemini completely or somehow find the motivation again… But it doesn’t help that the handful of time I opened Lagrange and Cosmos last year when bored somewhere, I still read close to 0 posts… Maybe the middle ground solution is to find a way to publish cleanly my blog there even if I’m not interacting anymore?

I’ve received emails about my 2 main services: to add new links to the tinylog agregator, which I didn’t do, and to notice me that Discogem (provide 5 new capsule per day) doesn’t work properly anymore… Yet I did nothing about those.

I need to decide quickly, because I don’t like not answering to people and having half baked services running. Either I fixed those or just stop them, but I don’t like this middle broken situation.

Content shoutout

I don’t usually share what I read or watch on this blog, but for this year review, I thought I could share just some of the things that I liked the most.

Regarding books, I read about 25+, which is not a lot, but is not so bad either. My top 5 for the year is:

1. La vie devant soit - Romain Gary (English title: The Life Before Us) - An old book (1975 - won the prix Goncourt that year), but an incredible one. Very touching and beautifully written as if you were the young momo (main character). Loved it so much I read it almost too fast.
2. Discours de la servitude volontaire - Etienne de La Boétie (English title: Discourse on Voluntary Servitude) - Even older book (1577) and a very short one, but it is incredible to see how well he understood how people and power works. What was true for the tyrants and their subject back then is still very true today, just to a different scale and titles. As righlty written in this book: « […] So the first reason for voluntary servitude is habit. »
3. Les Identités meurtrières - Amin Maalouf (English title: In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong) - Again, not a recent book (written in 1998), but still 100% relevent today, maybe even more so than in 1998…
4. Un monde sous dopamine - Anna Lembke (English title: Dopamine Nation)
5. Houris - Kamel Daoud (I don’t believe it has been translated yet). Winner of the Prix Goncourt 2024, a book that is though to read about a woman who survived the dark decades in Algeria (1992-2002).

I’m trying to think about a movie that I really loved this year, but can’t think of any (I can think of good movies, but not great ones)… I don’t watch many to be honnest, so it might be the reason why :).

In term of TV shows, I liked Arcane even though I was not familiar with the LoL lore. I didn’t even watch house of dragons or the rings of power even though I’m planing to. Silos season 2 is also one I’m looking for but haven’t started.

Regarding games, I’m not a big gamer, I often play the same games and usually sporadically. But this year the new extension of Factorio came out and I logged a lot of hours playing it in the last 3 months… My other go to game is from 1999: Heroes of might and magic III and now I play VCMI, an open-source engine for Heroes III that allows to expend the game even more. Love it :).

Selfhosting and Code

Not going to talk a lot about this here, because I think it is time to write a dedicated “state of my selfhosting” soon. But after the issue I had in April, I resetted a lot of services. I have moved to proxmox for the past 2 years and the update to proxmox 8 went very well. The latest addition is Immich for saving pictures and videos. It is a great software, but I made it available only from my local network (yet?). Again, more on my selfhosting setup later this year.

I didn’t do much code this year for personal project. I miss it though… That was also one of the reason I like gemini, it was great for creating simple yet useful software. Maybe I’ll find a need to scratch to write a bit more GoLang or Python code this year.

More personal

This year has been full of different emotion, but the main events I remember (in chronological order):

• Going through a very tough period due to loosing all my data and backups
• Some great vacations in Mexico (work paid a good part of it, which made them maybe even better) and Spain with my partner
• Adopting a puppy, it just changed completely our day to day life
• A freaking great week of gaming with my brother and a friend like teenagers
• Going through a brutal period of layoff. While not being personally impacted, it was a very tough time. Still is… We will see how 2025 go through though.
• Being scared for my mother that went through a very complicated medical issue and is still recovering for it. At least now she is in the right direction, but it will take time to go back to normal

What about 2025?

Ok, that was a longer review that I expected for 2024… So let’s try to be faster for the 2025 previsions :).

For this blog

I’m happy with many things around this site which I won’t touch: the theme (at least in dark mode, I may change a bit the light mode), the blog posts and the deployment workflow. That being said, there are always things to improve, add or change. In no particular order, I might work on the following point this year:

• Micro blogging: I would like to add micro blogging to this site, and sync it with my Fediverse account. I like having some post here that I want to keep on my site. It will push me to write shorter type of post like “TIL” or sharing comments on links. I don’t intend to move responses to other or things like that to this blog though. My Fediverse account is good enough for that.
• Article sharing: Right now, I don’t like the bookmarks area of this site. Plus, my linkding public page is just spammed by bot crawling it. So much so that I disabled it right now, so next time I deploy my blog, the bookmark page will be empty if I don’t remember to just reactivate it for the next deployment.
• Hidden articles: I’ve talked about having private posts before, something I’m still thinking about and I believe I now have the how. I also have one post in mind. But I still need to write the said post as well as adding this new steps in my deployment workflow.

For Gemini

As said above, this is something I need to think about. I don’t like the current state of semi broken things. Either I fix things or remove them completely but I don’t want to keep things as is. But I need to find time and motivation for doing so.

Personal

Something I was doing before and stopped since I lost previous data is track again the book I read. I’m thinking something simpler than what I used to have in a spreadsheet and instead have something similar to how I maintain my manga collection within a simple org file.

My todo list is also quite long, I should really do some of these things in there… Also I have an even longer todo list for blog posts, so that is something to look forward to this year!

Take care and hope 2025 will bring great news to everyone (even though the state of the world might not agree with that right now)!