2024 Recap
What a year!
Not as productive as last year, with only 18 posts this time (19 including this one), but I decided to post less for several reasons.
The first one, is that right at the start of this year I had some events in my personal life that had an impact on my passion for writing. I’ve pretty much recovered since, but this explains some quietness in the blog during February.
The second one is that I felt a strong burnout from programming. I do programming for a living, it’s also my hobby, and they say “Find A Job You Love And You’ll Never Work A Day In Your Life”, but it doesn’t really work. I love programming, really do, but it takes a lot of mental energy, and when you’re writing code for your whole day at work, and then come home and write code for your projects fatigue tends to pile up. So I took a break from Fennel, and pretty much focused on Clojure and work stuff. I also became a software architect this year and had to adjust my way of thinking a bit, so programming is no longer the main task at my job, and after a bit of rest, I was finally ready to go back to coding in my spare time.
Before that happened though I bought myself a new guitar, and finally put up my first pedalboard! Look at this beauty:
Figure 1: Signal chain: Fender Telecaster → Polytune mini 3 → Yellow Comp → Pitch Box → Blues Driver → Mojomojo→ Flashback 2 → Hall of Fame 2 → Orange Crush 20 RT
Now I have three guitars - two electric guitars and a bass. Getting a new guitar (the red one in the photo) was a great way to kick-start my interest in playing again, as I hadn’t done so for the last five or so years. I bought a Japanese-manufactured Fender Telecaster made in 1993 for a moderate price, and I love it! Plays and feels really great - I started to record myself again and made a small Telegram channel to post stuff about it, as I don’t really want to overwhelm GitLab with video files. But here’s a short one:
I have used modelers for most of my time playing guitar, meaning that I would just plug my guitar into an audio interface, and add virtual implementations of various gear to shape my sound. Like virtual overdrive and delay pedals, virtual amps, cab sims, etc. So getting myself a real pedalboard was a step up from that in some sense, as I love analog interfaces with knobs. VSTs just didn’t do that for me. However, I still use emulation when recording.
Haven’t read much this year. Mostly manga, but again, I was kinda overwhelmed with life stuff, so it was a small escape route for me.
I had a lot of comments this year! 20 unique emails, not including replies and continued discussions. That’s even more than there were posts! I’m extremely glad that everyone commenting, it makes me feel much better about this blog being read, and not just existing for no one.
Managed to participate in FennelConf 2024. Prepared a talk about dependency management and my latest crazy package for Emacs require-fennel.el. It was cool as always, and I’m happy to be a part of this amazing community.
Now, for the next year, I have some plans.
I finally decided to learn some music theory, so that’s one thing I’m excited about. I’ve been playing guitar for more than ten years now, but only recently decided to “up my game” a bit, and actually figure out what I’m doing.
As for this blog, and my projects - not so long ago I started working on a game in LÖVE2D, so maybe expect some dev-logs next year. I don’t know though, making games is hard, and I only work on this project when I have the passion to, so it may take a long time for anything to be made public. Maybe not even in the next year. We’ll see.
And that’s it! I wish you a happy new year, and excited to see what the next year will bring us! See you in 2025!