nevada_scout

This Year

2022 was a pretty good year. After nearly buying a house with a flooded basement in 2021, we started the year by picking a builder for a new house -- booking a construction slot with them over a year in advance. We traveled to the UK, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Spain, Gibraltar, and to the mountains in Southern Poland.

I finished a multi-year project at work (rewriting our frontend codebase from AngularJS to Angular), and I wrote an article about it for the internal engineering newsletter and external engineering blog (yet to be published). I created two videos, one that summarised a hackathon project that I worked on with my partner and her friend, and another on "how to write unmaintainble code" for our all company meeting.

I also started learning Rust again and I used it to build a small CLI tool called j5s for viewing Jenkins build statuses. After several years of running Plex on an old PC, I set up a new Raspberry Pi 4B (8GB) with an external HDD and migrated the Plex server there. This should reduce the Plex server power use considerably, and its a lot quieter and cooler.

I set up an IP camera on our building plot and used a cron to run some scripts to capture periodic photos to make a timelapse of the house construction. Sadly the camera stopped working properly after we had some pretty cold weather (it was down to -14C) and I've yet to fix or replace it.

To allow to access devices remotely (including the plot IP camera), I also set up Tailscale mesh VPN. It was so easy to set up, and we've found it very useful for remote access. The exit node feature also allowed us to watch Amazon Prime content while on holiday in the UK.

Next Year

The main thing to look forward to in 2023 is having our house built. We have a company that will do most of the construction work, but my partner and I will be doing almost all of the finishing work inside (drywalling, plastering, tiling, etc). We have a limited smart home setup in our current apartment (for lighting and air conditioning), I'd like to have smart home lighting in parts of the house as well.

I got several cookbooks for Christmas, and I'd like to make sure of them by cooking more (in our new kitchen). However, I've gotten quite overweight in in the last year, so I'd like to lose 10kg in 2023. I'm unsure yet how exactly to do this, but eating less appears to be the "simple" solution. Maybe I will only eat one meal per day?

I'd also like to continue working with Rust, and continue looking for a product or service idea to work on. I've written down quite a few ideas for "mini products" (eg. 15 page ebook, a chrome plugin, a small CLI binary, etc) and I want to launch 2 of them and get at least 1 sale for each of them.