Title: 2024 plans and 2023 retrospective
Author: Solène
Date: 09 January 2024
Tags: life blog
Description: Let me share my plans for 2024, and my a recap of my year
2023!
# Hello!
It happens that I occasionally write a blog post to give some news
about my own projects and life(style), this is such a blog post!
# 2023's projects
2023 was a special year for me, I've been terribly sick early January,
and this motivated me to change a lot of things in my life. I stuck to
this idea the whole year and I still continue to lurk for changing
things in my life.
## Work
I left the company I was working for, and started to work as a
freelance DevSecOps/DevOps. The word "Sysadmin" would be the best job
title for me, but people like buzzwords and nobody talk about system
administrators anymore.
Since the end of the year, I also work as a technical writer for a VPN
provider (that I consider ethical), and it makes me think that in the
future, I may have a career shift to being a technical writer "only".
## The blog
Since 2023, I have a page on Patreon allowing my readers to support me
financially, in exchange for a few days of early access for most blog
posts. This is an advantage to reward my supporters without being a
loss for all other readers. Patreon helps me a lot as it allows me to
plan on a monthly income and spend more time on my blog or contributing
to open source projects. I also added other payments option as some
wanted to support me using more free (as in freedom) methods like
liberapay, BTC or XMR.
The blog also received a few technical changes, mostly in the HTML
rendering like captions on pictures or headers numbering. I'm quite
pleased with the result right now, and the use of GemText (from Gemini)
markup was a right choice a few years ago as it gives a simple
structure enforcing clarity (of course it's bad if you need a complex
layout).
The content finally got a proper license: CC-BY-4.0, I'm an open source
person, but my own content was under no license, what a shame for all
this time...
## Open Source
Last year, I started using Qubes OS as it's the best operating system
for my needs (a blog post will cover this "soon") and I got involved
into the community and in testing the 4.2 release that got out a few
weeks ago by now.
I'm still contributing to OpenBSD, but not as much as I want, simply
because of lack of hardware (and a bit of time), but this is now solved
after my deal with NovaCustom. I still maintain the packages updates
build cluster.
In 2023, I entirely dropped NixOS, but I preferred to not write a blog
post about it to avoid a flame war, but maybe I'll write one. In a few
words, I didn't like the governance issues of the project, it seems
company driven to me and from my point of view it's harmful for the
open source project. The technology is awesome, but the "core team"
struggles to get somewhere. I'll investigate more Guix as I always
enjoyed this project, and they proved they are a reliable and solid
project able to maintain their pace over time.
## The OpenBSD Webzine
It's my favorite pet project, even though it's a lot of work to publish
a single issue.
Working with Prahou for the special Halloween issue was really fun as
instead of writing the content, I had to give some direction to keep
the issue on rails for being a Webzine issue, while being able to enjoy
it like any other reader as I didn't make the content itself.
# 2024's project
## Lifestyle
For no reasons, I decided to experiment vegetarian diet up to end of
February (I still eat eggs, milk, butter, cheese or rarely fish). I'm
bad at cooking, I don't enjoy it much but mostly because I have no idea
what to cook. This forces me to learn about new food and recipes I was
not aware of. Buying a recipes book is definitely a must for this :-).
I never really enjoyed meat, and it's possible that I may keep the
vegetarian diet for a longer time.
## Open source
This is the year of the comeback on OpenBSD, I really enjoy
contributing to it, helping the community and reviewing some ports I
care of.
I'll also continue contributing to Qubes OS, this niche operating
system deserves some more contributors.
## The blog
I'll try to stick to a weekly blog post schedule. Of course, I also
need to work in parallel, and sometimes I'm just out of ideas :-)
## Work
Let's see what 2024 will bring for me!
# Best wishes!
I'd like to thank all my readers. I regularly receive emails about
your enjoyments, or typos reports, or suggestions to improve the
content, this really drives me continuing writing.