I've finally reached the last chapter before leaving my twenties. It's been a decent year with kind of a pinnacle at the end - let's take a quick look back.

My blog

After running on Ghost for many years I've released a new version of my blog in June 2019 which is powered by Gatsby. After nearly half a year of using it I'm still satisfied with this choice, especially after switching to GitHub actions for rebuilding. The only issue I'm currently facing is something related to the future of my blog - but more on that in a few seconds.

In terms of analytics it has gotten up a bit; from ~250k visitors last year (from January to October) we're at ~300k this year within the same range.

I've managed to increase post frequency - from 12 posts last year to 20 posts this year (so far). It's not as frequent as I like it to be - but I'm already satisfied.

My work

For most of the year I've worked on an Angular project for a managed hosting platform, Aurora WP. It's not done yet - but what I can tell at this point is that it's a realtime UI with lots of very cool features. The techniques, issues and things I've learned from this project would probably deserve its own blog (which, maybe, even becomes a reality at some point in the future).

My life

Some time ago I read an article stating that "you should reduce commute as much as possible". In my case commute has always been a major part of my life; between my work and my home was a distance of only 80 kilometers. At some point travelling 160 km per day (or, in other words, nearly three hours) became a part of my life. To put this in a different perspective: I woke up at 5:20, started to work at 7:45, left the office at around 17:00 and arrived at home at around 19:00. Every. Single. Fucking. Day (except weekend of course).

And, even if time during commute is not completely wasted (your possibilities are just very limited) I've never fully enjoyed this experience. Especially since during the last few years the amount of pupils drastically increased in the train, resulting in an impossibility of finding some sleep or doing some work which required a certain amount of concentration. Honestly, a lof of people in public transport are just a bunch of retards who have no idea how to behave in a public place at all - no matter if they just entered school or already planing their own funeral.

But the times where I forcefully had to listen to Fortnite stories, the old lady telling her niece that her phone pin (which is 2368 in case you're interested) only worked after entering it like six times, the construction workers who discussed how well they banged their wife last night, the girl and the mother who loudly exchanged information about how much they bleed during their menstruation, the older dude who tried to get the number of a girl which probably could have been his daugther or the girl who wore the same pants for around half a year and her not-so-silent farts while she slept are finally over.

I've finally moved to the city where I work. The distance between my home and the office is now approx. three minutes (six if drunk). By foot.

As you can imagine life has become a lot easier (and the amount of sleeping hours has drastically increased). The new location may be more expensive - but the money is spent on life quality, and there's nothing better to spent your money than life quality.

This process took slightly longer than expected which explains my neglected online presence for the last few weeks. But I'm mostly done, hence being able to get back to work again.

What's next

I'm currently working on the next big update of my blog which will include something I want to do for a long time now: offering software development courses. I do have some great ideas for courses to differ from existing ones (hence it's unlikely to see yet another "How to get started with TypeScript" course), but before being able to talk more about course content I need to solve another problem;

It's hard to create protected content with Gatsby. Even by following the official guide the content is still not really secured; it's just harder to access it. Since you're able to rewrite client-side code pretty easily within your browser this really doesn't fit for really secure systems, like paid content.

The solution to that is to protect the content server-side. Unfortunately that's easier said than done, since all I have for content serving is Ghost at the moment. To make this possible I need to extend my infrastructure with a system which allows for creating an ecommerce system (to buy and pay for courses) and also will serve the course content - funnily this system will most likely be powered by WordPress.

Since this entire setup requires a lot of work this update will take some time - but it's something I'm definitely going to focus for now. So stay tuned for some awesome courses to be released!

And, since this post is actually about my birthday, let's not forget the really important thing about it:

Happy birthday, me!