2023 Year Review
What a year, I spent most of my time on a sail boat, cruising around the Caribbean etc, and working part-time for Wikimedia on Wikibase.
WBStack became Wikibase.Cloud and the team now working behind it has continued to iterate on the platform, which finally made its way out of its early alpha state. That also came with a snazzy new landing page, and set of logos for Wikibase etc.
Infact, in the last few weeks I finally saw all of the old wbstack Github issues finally migrate onto Phabricator for the team to more easily view and work with.
I look forward to creating an overview of the things that have changed with Wikibase.Cloud year on year at some point, as an overview of the progression of the platform that I still believe is very important to the continued growth of Wikibase.
In the less digital world, I turned our many boaty blog posts and pictures into a book! No you can’t buy one (maybe if we made a 2nd edition. But can we consider ourselves published authors now? It has an ISBN on the back, after all?
Getting back on dry land in late June I changed jobs and jumped right back into the “grind” at Lightbug where I have been primarily working on the cloud and backend services.
I didn’t slow down in writing blog posts for this blog, spitting out 25 throughout the year.
Top 10 for 2023 were:
- Installing Android Studio on WSL2 for Flutter (again #1 ➡️)
- Python3, Using some shared state in 2 async methods (was #3 ⬆️)
- VSCode & PHP XDebug from Localhost, WSL2 and Docker containers (was #2 ⬇️)
- Add Exif data back to Facebook images – 0.10 (was #6 ⬆️)
- Guzzle 6 retry middleware (was #8 ⬆️)
- Your own Wikidata Query Service, with no limits (was #5 ⬇️)
- Automatic cleanup of old gcloud container images (new in the top 10 🆕)
- If you bake 2 lasagnes, and stack them, do you have 1 or 2 lasagnes? (was at #7 ⬇️)
- Quickly clearing out your Facebook advert ‘interests’ (was #4 ⬇️)
- sudo / elevate on Windows 11 (new in the top 10 🆕)
None of these were written in the last year that I can spot by eye, so looks like my back catalogue is the most interesting.
I’m in a new house, so starting to blog about my experiments with, first with some basic networking, and now with some sensors. I expect much more to come here throughout the year.
You can certainly see where my most focused periods of time off were in 2023 by looking at my open source Github contributions, mainly during big ocean crossings or during periods of 0 work at all.
It’s nice being back on dry land, though writing this in the wet and windy February in the UK I do miss the sunshine of the Caribbean.
On this day, 1 year ago, I was exploring a mangrove covered area on Martinique…
I look forward to getting back in touch with my Wikimedia volunteer side more at the 2024 Wikimedia hackathon, I hope to get back up to speed on the Wikimedia / MediaWiki developer environment world, and at least fix the CI on mwcli (Maybe I should just move it back to GitHub again)
Until next time!