Oh hi, it’s been a while.

Since my last post here:

Victoria, Australia, and the world wound down precautions against the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. There go my lockdown coding projects.

I’ve concluded almost all of my freelance and volunteer web development commitments. No more pressure to keep up with the latest trends, now I can just tinker and code for fun. It takes me back to my undergraduate days learning first-generation HTML, or even further back to learning to program on an Apple IIe at school or a Commodore 64 at home.

I don’t miss PHP one bit. In fact I barely miss web development at all – going back to a static website (built with Hugo in my case) has freed up some mental space that I’ve been devoting to annoying my partner with home automation, learning Docker (still on the fence about its usefulness for small self-hosted services), and building little data reporting utilities for work. Python has become my go-to general-purpose language though I’ll use JavaScript for interfacing with web APIs and I’m mildly curious about Go and Rust.

I completed a Graduate Diploma in Information Management – converted down from a Master’s because two years of part-time fully-online study was trying my patience. I started working for the Australian Queer Archives halfway through my studies. The job title and description are managerial/administrative in nature, but this being a small community organisation, titles and boundaries are porous and both my IT past and GLAMRous future seep in to the role.

At this point in 2023, last year’s wake-up call to Twitter users has spread to Reddit, and will hopefully soon expand to Discord, Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp/Meta, and even GitHub/Microsoft. More and more tech and non-tech people are moving their social media and social networking presence to the decentralised “fediverse”, which to this 90s geek, feels so familiar. It’s now easier than ever to rent your own domain name and web hosting space, and rebuild small online communities founded on geographic proximity and shared interests and values.

So I’ve purged the Twitter, LinkedIn, and GitHub links from the menu, and am slowly moving my git repositories to a private Gitolite server on my home Raspberry Pi (I just need reliable git repository management, no need for a web interface or project management tools). I’m probably keeping my GitHub account for now in case I want to interact with projects hosted there, but if I wanted to host public code repositories I would take a serious look at Sourcehut or Codeberg.