I wrote this about 3 weeks ago, but held off on posting it
#2023SoFar

Hey there, it’s been a while!
I knew SSB existed in the back of my head, but I never really took the time to go back to it. It’s time to do a sit down and just think about the end of 2022 and what has happened in 2023 so far.

Now is the perfect time, I’m just sitting in front of the laser cutter in our workshop looking at the laser head toiling away trying to make a welcome sign to our wedding in Acrylic.
It’s a bit stinky, but the result seems to come together nicely.

So what has happened since I last wrote…

In May last year I met a fantastic person on “Norrlands Hawaii”, just off the coast of my city up here in Sweden. She’s awesome and absolutely amazing!
After a trip to the big cliff in Sarek last fall she even became my Fiancé! Better yet; we’re getting married in a few weeks! Organising the wedding has been a challenge, but we’re getting there :)

Development-wise; just before I dropped off on this platform I started a new project in Germany (while working remote in Sweden).
it’s been a blast so far with a lot of green-fielding in React and lots of machine- and simulated data that needs to be processed In to graphs and dashboards. Basically Every Dribbble-designer’s dream.
It’s been fun; even though I will probably never agree with the composition of the tech stack and the “databases” that were chosen to host our relational data.

Last year has been bit of a mixed bag. I got to learn a lot of new stuff about React just by working on it every day for a couple of months and I’ve been able to dip my toes in to some Next.JS stuff, server-side rendering, jsonForms (which is really cool… once you override their hideous index-key-based state-context machine) and just a bunch of stuff in Typescript, Lua, Ruby and Elixir spaces!

Back in November I finally brought my entire NVIM configuration to be Lua-first instead of vim script with Lua tags. You can check out my trials and tribulations at https://git.hendrikpeter.net/hendrikpeter/pico-vim (I switched to a white theme last weekend, so I can write code without killing my eyes while sitting out in the garden; so be careful if you pull it down, it’s bright).

Challenges ahead of me (and us) in general before the end of the year

The wedding

Obviously the wedding and the trip afterward. I’m really looking forward to both, Vera is awesome!

Podcasting

I ran https://patraden.knightec.se/ for a few episodes with my colleagues Kim & Jeger. The recording, editing and the reception from listeners was just an awesome experience. I’m looking for folks around me in the office to pick that back up.. but in English or maybe a combo between 1 pod in Swedish every month and then an English one bi-weekly… I don’t know yet, but it’s point 1 on the agenda after the wedding.

Upgrade housing-wise

A 1.5-er is nice, but I’d love to put a 3d printer and my SO’s machines and work equipment in a dedicated room for creativity. We both really like this side of the city and whenever we get back from traveling to our little home-town between the mountains. I mean we both just instantly click into that mode of truly being home. So it would need to be somewhere around here I suppose.

The future and the next thing for me

It’s been a blast to work at my office and swim in the world of med-tech with the biggest players in that space, but I don’t know; while I get to teach on my current job and at our customers I’d love to do that more in an official capacity as a tech lead or (coding) team coach.

Back to monoliths,

I’m done with all this CDK stuff and pushing every little action off into separate lambdas. Holding multi-stack infrastructures up feels more like sheep-herding with extra steps than coding beautiful systems when your entire product is maintained by a handful of developers.

The major lesson I’ve confirmed for myself is that it’s just soooo nice to start with a simple monolith and then branch of into micro-services and lambdas when that starts to make sense (growing customer-base, growing team, growing product or dealing with things other languages and frameworks are just much better at).
But please not the other way around; creating a product with micro-services, lambdas and micro-transactions that can hold tens of thousands of users in a space where you expect at most a handful of early adopters with a tiny development team is just awful. especially if every little element developed is hand-crafted an not off the shelf. we could have at least gone with serverless or something of the likes instead of writing our own hand-crafted CDK system.
Yeah google, Amazon and friends do micro-services and stuff and they are great companies raking in billions, but they are huge companies that have grown over time.

Embrace: Special snowflakes are not worth it.

Go flame me in the comments, but goodness. I’ve been in a few situations now where people around me chose to spend weeks and sometimes even months of development (and then years of maintaining it) on something that could have been fixed in 5 minutes. Sometimes you gotta get to bend UX a bit if the trade-off is -100+ hours of work and double that in maintenance down the road really worth not having a little extra button?

more SSB & More DWeb

It’s highly time I got back in the seat. But I’ll continue to be around as just a user & tinkerer. also where are all the Crab meets at?

Learn and get ahead of the “Proomting” game (formerly known as googling things)

It’s probably just a temporary thing, but I think we entered the next “Napster” moment where internet, things on the internet and development arrives at a pivotal point. Co-pilot has been creeping me out at times with its suggestions and I figure that's only going to get better.
We had a presentation back in 2019 when I first started at my current gig. The presenter (Dr. Kjell A Nordström) told how all of the knowledge we have in our society is on a pile and that the power of arriving at some conclusion first, but that that IP will at some point end up on that pile. Well that pile just became insanely easy to query with the sudden spike of interest in LLMs.

Bee keeping.

I’ve been holding off on that since I moved from the Netherlands, but it’s gotta be time at some point, not this year though as I should have started worrying about that back in March. So that’s going to be a thing for 2024.

Git worktrees & Nvim

I got sucked into that today and goodness it’s a nice rabbit hole

Get my fiancé a public key on this platform

This place is nice, gardens itself well and I don’t know, It’s fun in a slower and different way than other social media platforms are. You should try it Vera :)