Today is the first anniversary of the blog! I am actually quite happy that this didn’t just become abandoned after 3 posts. Instead I wrote a total of 10 posts (this is actually the 11th!) in 12 months, which is not bad at all, this is almost a post per month. I continue to look forward to post here!

Looking back

In the first post of the blog I mentioned the motivation on starting it: having personal projects, being in the flow and logging my thoughts/feelings. Creating this blog, specially in the very beginning, actually did put me in the flow. It was exciting to work on something new, to decide on what blogging platform to use and then to decide on the design. I also really enjoyed adding the Limmat temperature display, which I described how was done in the post “how this blog is published”. Since then I’ve also done a few upgrades to the blog, such as image galleries (e.g. in the posts “building a new computer” and “floating down the american river”) and enabling comments.

Another modification to the blog which went smooth is that I changed the domain registrar. I was a happy customer at Google Domains, but since they decided to sell to Squarespace I thought I’d pick a different provider. I ended picking Cloudflare Registrar and have been happy so far. There were some minor hiccups during the move relating to https but they were easy to fix. I get statistics and DDS protection out of the box.

I also continue to be very satisfied with the blogging setup. I write my posts in Markdown using Visual Studio Code. VS Code might be a bit overkill for this, but it’s convenient to have the terminal and source control integrated into an IDE. Thanks to Github Actions, publishing or editing a post is done by simply pushing into to the blog’s GitHub repository. One of my requirements is that I wanted it to be effortless to post and that I could easily change computers and continue blogging. I think I have achieved both of them.

Looking forward

While the blog did initially put me in the flow and is a nice side project, I’d like to have something more ambitious to work on. What I’d really like to work on again are games. I started working on one for a very brief period of time last summer but then didn’t work on it anymore. I think I would be absolutely thrilled to have something published on the Nintendo Switch Shop, regardless of how unpopular the game ends up being. From what I read back in last summer it’s not a simple process, but definitely something I’d like to eventually work on.

For now though I’m looking froward to working more on QuartoVerde. I think it could be a pretty cool project and it also doubles as a very nice source of blog posts, as I enjoy documenting the process, the results and also my thoughts on how this is going. The chances that it fails though are quite high, but that’s ok, I think it would be a great thing to look backwards to. If it gets even a single customer I’d be ecstatic, and if it doesn’t, I’d also already be proud of simply completing a project and seeing how it pans out!