Today’s the start of a new year, the last day of festive feasting and holiday-making before we, or most of us, return to work or school. Like with everyone reflecting on the year gone by and thinking about the one ahead, I’m going to do a little bit of that with today’s random musings post.
For my blog, 2018 has been busy. Even though I’ve undertaken fewer “field” engagements, it seems like the gadget review workload has increased somewhat. In fact, I’ve still got a bit of backlog on items sent to me, items I haven’t yet got the time to write the review posts for.
Looking ahead in 2019, I’ve either got to get more selective, or review my workflow, or both. I’m definitely looking into ways to get more productive with postings while lessening the effort on me.
I’m quite happy that my blog has stayed ahead in terms of its technical delivery capabilities. This blog website went fully HTTPS in March 2015, started to use better ECDSA-based certificates in March 2016, and became hard-coded in the HSTS Preload list in the Chrome browser in March 2018.
My blog website has also consistently achieved good scores for speed and mobile usability on various benchmarks. Most readers don’t care, but techies like me do look at these sort of accomplishments. These things take up time. This year’s theme refresh to accommodate WordPress’ new Gutenberg editor did indeed take quite a lot of effort, though I’m glad I invested the time and energy into the endeavour.
Apart from gadget reviews, I hope to start writing more to share technical knowledge by way of tutorials and how-to articles in areas I’m familiar with. It’s funny, but sometimes writing these posts do end up helping myself, because I might need to refer to them myself some years later. I want my blog to serve as a trove of useful technical information.
I’ve celebrated enough year-end/new-year events that, you know, the turn to the 2019 new year is just another day. It’s a public holiday, so that’s a good thing, of course, but it’s like just another day that I’m not working. I hear about countdown celebrations and wonder, yeah, what’s the big deal. I mean, 2000 was perhaps something significant. But what’s so important about this year?
The new year is like a new beginning, or at least that’s what I used to think. But this is really just a very arbitrary point in time. When you’re in the middle of a big project, what difference is there between 31 December and 2 January? It’s not as if your project enters a new phase because of the new year.
I know for school-going people whose school year is aligned with calendar years, each new year is certainly a new phase. Some years could bring more significant changes than others.
The life of a working adult would seem to revolve less around calendar years. Unless, of course, you have children in school and whose school years are aligned with calendar years. This is the case for me, though I still just see the new year as a public holiday to relax. Sometimes, a public holiday is the time to catch up on chores and errands. That’s what I’ve been doing during the year-end wind down.
Happy new year 2019.