Quick Update
Just a little blog update and some details about my projects. Oh look, and a new theme for the blog. Do you like it?
As always, I hope to impress upon you that I have been charged to share what God has given me with those around me and that I hope to do a little bit of that through this blog and the products that come of it. Yes I said products, but remember that this is my hobby and that I have a job as a software engineer already.
These products I make and work on will continue to be open source and available to public free of cost. I may develop paid upgrades or features for some of them in the future but the core that I develop as FOSS will remain that way so long as I am in front of the projects.
Where have I been?
Earlier this year, my wife and I had a son. He is doing well and the family is great. Why is this important to the blog and my dev work?
You see, I have a job and limited amounts of time. With that time, I have to select my personal projects carefully and ensure that I work on what I believe to be the item of greatest impact.
In the limited time I have, I produced one YouTube video covering my thoughts on the Unraid 7 upgrade and some general best practices behind upgrading. I wanted to do more, but it is very time consuming and I haven’t gotten to making videos since then.
A Successful Project
I spent the better chunk of the summer working through a project on under cabinet lighting in my kitchen. It was a great success! There’s a couple loose ends to tie up, mostly dangling wires to hide. But the project is a hit with my family and friends. Fully integrated with Home Assistant, it gives me light in the early mornings when I wake up without needing to find a light switch and provides softer/warmer light in mornings and evenings.
I really wanted to make a whole YouTube video covering the process, details, and difficulties but I never got around to it. With everything going on, I may never get around to it. The video files are sitting idle in my Immich folder on my home server.
If the video doesn’t come out this year, then don’t hold your breath anymore for it.
A New Effort
With all that said and done, I began working on a new webapp. I will make a post dedicated to it shortly, I hope. But for now, it is out on my GitLab and is receiving regular updates from me.
Baby Book is your companion for tracking all of the ongoings of your baby. Surprised? My wife searched high and low for a good app that did have malicious intent behind every corner and although she found one, it was fishy in the marketing realm. So I decided to make my own to solve our problem of tracking naps and feeds on pen and paper. It works great for us and I have lots of ideas for the future.
This effort has been quite time consuming on top of raising a little one and I don’t regret a single moment of it, but it is slow going. Only around 60 hours into the project and I have released 9 versions (10th incoming). It has been a fun challenge but has prevented me from doing other things.
Where do we go from here?
Now that Baby Book is in a good, usable state I can refocus on other efforts. A short list of my priorities:
- Common eslint config for my JS projects
- Media Utils which is a set of CLI tools for manipulating media files on my server
- Watch Go updates to make it actually redraw the terminal instead of just printing
- Renovate for dependency updates in my various projects
- Secondary blog site
With that being said, if a project for Baby Book comes up, I will probably put a little more time into it than into the rest. At least for now.