So May happened. I’m not discouraged though, rather than giving up on blogging what happened was that I got sidetracked into two new projects.
The first one is the redevelopment of my personal portfolio, a project which began back in 2017, when my twins were about 4. At the time, I had landed what I finally thought was the sweet spot of my career at a web development agency which didn’t demand an insane sacrifice to the work side of the work-life balance equation.
I had been reflecting on the notion that climbing up the career ladder as a web developer was a little like leveling up a character in a video game RPG and decided to use my many hours playing Ultima as a youngster as my direct inspiration for creating an online portfolio. I started building a JavaScript mini game where a character could navigate around a map, kill monsters, and then unlock both loot drops and “experience” which would reveal part of my CV.
I still think it’s a brilliant notion, but the work got stalled by having two demanding pre-school aged children and a general inability to manage my time consistently. The work stalled out in late 2018 and I got stuck a bit on the technical aspects of using Ruby on Rails as my framework of choice.
In recent months I have revived what I started with, got rid of the dependency on JQuery, and ported the whole thing over to vanilla JS. I’ve also added a few new planned features. It’s not even nearly ready for public consumption, so I’m still keeping it top secret, but it’s definitely back on track.
The other project flew at me out of the blue and I’ll probably not dip into it too much just at the moment, because I think an actual launch of it may be fairly imminent. I’m excited about it.
It’s unusual for me to have this many projects sparking up going into winter. My default mode in winter is straight up hibernation; I just don’t thrive in the dark and cold. Part of me is glad that I have something I’m actively interested in to keep me going, but the other half is resenting having to do anything other than huddle under a blanket and watch media.
Oh well, only a week until the solstice and then the sun will be reborn after being eaten by the darkness.