Things look different around here…
That’s because I finally got bored of the old Hexo theme and decided to make my own little dorky one - called ‘Terminal’ (original name, I know).
It’s just a super simple retro computer inspired theme, nothing too special. I might add more featured onto it as time goes on but for now it should very much be considered a “Work in some progress” , A.K.A “When I get free time and motivation” project.
It was super simple to make and easy to add config options for, get styled - but ultimately it’s only me who uses this blog as a dumping ground, so unsure if I’ll spend more time on the theme as there’s little chance it will get use outside of this space.
I’ve been a busy boy!
Work has been keeping me extremely busy and like all good employees I cannot say in too much detail on what exactly. I will say that I’ve taken the lead on several cool in house projects that are finally starting to bear fruit, one of them involved exploring a tech that I’d heard a lot about for a long time but never got to use - Strapi.
It’s a really neat headless CMS solution that I’d heard a lot about but never really needed to use in a commercial environment before, but I got the opportunity to do so and I’ve managed to achieve the goals of the project far ahead of schedule and in relatively little pain ( but I’m sure that will come ).
My main sticking points with Strapi currently all come down to the UX for the actual ‘content editor’ user - I know that with proper time you could theoretically go and create a unique UX to accommodate your specific goals, but I was hoping for more traditional content tools such as page structuring, or nested components being a bit more intuitive, but again it may be with more time these issues become less of an issue as you bend the tool to your own instance. For what it does however - I am very happy with it.
I also got time earlier on in the year to play with Playwright, I enjoy it but most of my testing has previously been done in Cypress and it’s been hard ditching old habits to transition to the ‘New’ way of doing things. Excited again to see where this leads to down the line as I do like the speed and organization of Playwright.
I did a few smaller projects in dot net using EF - Whilst I “get it” I just don’t enjoy the development pipeline nearly as much as say, working on an SPA in Vue and pairing it up with a node DB or similar. I will admit that EF did surprise me and I found the migrations super useful on more than one occasion.
Outside work
I’ve been playing a tonne more guitar and cranking out new music, I’ve been absolutely loving getting into EuroRack recently and also bought a Deepmind 12 over Christmas ( I think I mentioned before? ) - Anyways. I’m not going to say that Eurorack is exactly “easy” to work with in Ableton for compositions, in fact I think it’s probably more effort than it’s worth most of the time. It’s proving to be a lot like adult lego, in so as the fact I find myself creating cute little patches and never knowing what to do with the things. I’m sure if I had some fancy studio setup and space to have more modules that it would click for me, but currently it does just feel like something to doodle around with.
The Deepmind however continues to blow my mind with how versatile it is. Next up has for sure got to be a Prophet, If I get my hands on a Prophet 12 I think my gear aquisiation syndrome will subside for a little bit…
Other Stuff
I’ve also recently got back into Eve Online this year after a year and a half hiatus, I found a great Corp ( guild in other games ) to fly with called “Running With Dogs” who are part of the “Only Fleets” alliance, I’m having an absolute blast. Living down in null sec, finding content, being pinged for large space fleets.
I’m very lucky that the group is mature enough to take the game seriously whilst also understanding we all have a life outside of video games. It’s refreshing to be able to have a conversation about growing up listening to the spice girls one minute, only to be told we need to form a defensive fleet and scare away attackers.
Just last night I led a wormhole hunting expedition with several other corp mates, going after some miners looking for some fun kills. We got em’ - then promptly continued to blow up when we got too cocky and challenged two ships well well above our punching weight, but laughs were had and lessons learned.
Fingers crossed it continues to be this fun for a long time, and I can no doubt bore people at the pub with my war stories in Eve.
Now the sun is starting to shine again, I’m looking forward to some hikes and holidays this year, tickets booked for Arctangent in August where I’ll get to see Primus play, to say I cannot wait is an understatement. A couple of small camping trips planned with friends too - so that’ll be nice.
That’s all for now, wanted to keep it casual and brief and let the internet know I still live.