In the Year 2022

It's been quite a while since I last wrote here, so I figured I would check in. Now that .com domains are an absolutely outrageous $14 I'll have to get my money's worth for this site and start using it as a bit more of a blog. Let's get to it.

The last time I wrote here was when I started seeing news articles about this weird flu over in China. Unrelated, a little while later I decided to start a side project - makesomethingreal.com. I figured I'd just dedicate an hour a day or so to it and carry on with my routine otherwise. I ended up half-starting a bunch of projects in .NET Core, Django, Laravel, Symfony, etc. and it fizzled out. Then that little flu I'd been hearing about was suddenly at my doorstep, and we were in an immediate lockdown. I guess I was lucky in that my job stayed open, but boy is it hard to have a side project when all you're thinking about is "I have to go to the grocery store, I don't feel good I need to get a test, I live downtown in a tourist trap and nobody is wearing a mask..."

So, I did the rational thing and bought a house in a new city where I don't know anyone. I made the move from St. Augustine to Jacksonville in 2021, and being a homeowner really has a way of derailing any projects you had begun previously. Where I used to come home and spend an hour on my latest project, now I found myself shopping for the best garbage can and learning how to replace fence posts. Don't get me wrong, having a new house presents plenty of opportunities for little tech projects to make life easier, but I just haven't found anything on the scale of the St Augustine Music Project to keep me occupied, and the person I left to run it in my absense has disappeared.

I'm hoping this summer will spark something creative in me that I can develop and use to catch up on modern practices. I'm in jacksonville now, which is an enormous city with what looks like plenty of meetup opportunities, but I don't know which ones are good and which ones are just sponsored by beer companies to get college kids out for free schwag. Hey, if you're nearby let me know.