End of the Year Wrap-up (2023)

Posted: December 31, 2023 | | Categories: Delphi, Miscellaneous

This was a big year for this site:

• I published 67 posts (the second most posts I published here in 14 years).
• Last year I only published 5 posts.
• The previous 5 years I published 50 posts combined.

You can see the current stats on the Statistics page; with a end of year snapshot in the image below.

One of the reasons for so many posts was that I did a lot more coding this year and that generated a lot of articles I needed to write about the cool stuff I learned. I also migrated the site from Joomla! to Eleventy which was a lot of work and generated a lot of new learnings for me and new code I wrote that I could share with the world here.

This site today is everything I ever wanted for it. For many years I played around with a lot of different Content Management Systems (CMS) to use for this site and others, settling on Joomla! for this site's first 13 years. What I always wanted, and what I finally have with the Eleventy version of the site today, is the ability to add any feature I want to the site using code I wrote myself. I'm very happy and comfortable using plugins and other people's sample code in the site, but for Joomla I wasn't able to code my own features for the site because I didn't know PHP and didn't take the time to learn all the ins and outs of Joomla.

With Eleventy I have a complete understanding (well, almost complete) of the inner workings of the site and already coded a lot of unique features into the site. I even published three Eleventy plugins, so I hope I'm helping others create better Eleventy-based sites as well.

I tried to pitch an Eleventy book to my publisher (I've already written 8 books) but I couldn't convince them. Fortunately, new Eleventy users have excellent Eleventy tutorials from people like Raymond Camden (I couldn't have built this site without help from Ray's site) and I learned a lot about Eleventy from Eleventy by Example: Create powerful, performant websites with a static-first strategy.

What else happened this year?

• I had shoulder surgery (4 issues fixed) and recovered to almost 100% (without pain, surprisingly).
• One of my children moved out of the house (one down, one more to go).
• I switched to a different team at Oracle (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure - OCI) and I'm much, much happier at work now.
• My wife and I bought an electric car (Volkswagen ID.4) and we love it (except for the infotainment system which is complete shit).
• I read 69 books.
• I did some new Delphi software development this year, even released a new utility for Outlook: Outlook Windows Delete Empty Inbox Folders.
• I did a fair amount (but never enough) of Flutter development this year, I love that framework.

What I have planned for next year?

More of the same, and more:

• Read at least 40 books; that's my typical yearly target.
• No estimates on post count here, sorry.
• More Flutter development (obviously).
• More Delphi development (hopefully).
• Learn Astro.
• Finish that damn Sleeping Dragon in a Mailbox project.

For more than a year now I worked on a project for electronics hobbyists that I planned to kickstart on Kickstarter. I built something that really helps me when building a microcontroller-based project. I'll explain more as I get closer to launch, but part of this solution requires an injection molded part, so I'm kickstarting the expenses of having the mold made.

As part of this, I created a new company last year called Fumbly Stuff, LLC to manage the few products I created. My hope is that this becomes my retirement hobby business a few years from now.

Finally, my goal is to learn Astro and deploy an updated e-commerce site for Fumbly Stuff for after the Kickstarter campaign completes.

Thank you for visiting my site and reading my posts. I hope you found something useful here!

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