Looking back on 2020

I'm not sure how much of it was "father of a toddler" and how much of it was "global pandemic", but 2020 felt hard.

While I've been fortunate enough that work hasn't changed for me – instead of going in to the office once a week (by choice), I just don't go in to the office and I haven't been to Tokyo since mid-February. We already communicated entirely with Slack with the only change being that people now hop into voice/video calls more readily than before. BeProud continues to be a fun place sling Python.

I started running regularly midway through the year with small gaps here and there. Thus far I've managed 64 runs totaling 317.6km. There's still a week left and I'm 15km away from my 50km distance goal this month, so those numbers will increase a bit.

This year I started on a path for digital independence and to control my own data. I moved my email from a gmail account made a couple of months they opened to my own domain hosted with Fastmail. If Google were to lock me out of my account for whatever reason, I should be mostly unaffected.

After many years of having no blog and no home on the internet, last year I began experimenting with blogging/tweeting with micro.blog. I slowly remembered how much fun it is to have a home on the internet – somewhere that you can call your own. And this year I moved to a self-hosted Wordpress (for now) blog. The community on micro.blog is great, so I still post there with my blog's RSS feed.

I also started to try working in public more. I haven't release anything yet, but I began collecting my notes, thoughts, and learnings here and in my notebook.

2020 also marks when I became aware of the impact of digital waste. As a web developer I've known that websites have been bloated for a while and it frustrates me to no end. But until this year (and thanks to Gerry McGovern I hadn't connected was the link between data transfer and energy consumption. This led to me writing two articles: Designing Sustainable Digital Products and a guide for migrating your Digital Ocean droplets to sustainable regions powered by renewable energy.

This new awareness also led me to try and reduce the data-transfer and requirements from my own website. I made a custom theme that uses system fonts and minimal css (though there's still too much).

Looking forward to the new year I'd like to double-down on low-energy blogging and websites. Not just for my own blog, but potentially as a service. I've started collecting my thoughts about how such a system could work to maximize privacy and minimize energy consumption in my blogging engine notebook.

Blogging makes the internet fun again and in 2021 I'd like to help people re-discover and remember that fun.