2024 Year Review

A very different year when compared to 2023 (where I spent most of the year on a boat).

I’m back working full-time, and primarily in a closed source space (currently) at Lightbug. I’m primarily cloud focused, but have been moving closer and closer to the firmware and hardware month by month. I’m looking forward to releasing some new things this year, including something with an ESP on board!

It’s been the first year that I have stepped back from Wikimedia since starting as a volunteer, and then also working there full-time, and that has been a refreshing break.

Within the Wikimedia world, my primarily volunteer focuses have been and will continue to be:

• The future of the Wikibase ecosystem
  • I wrote a whole series of posts about how the existing entity system works
  • Spent some time working on wikibase.world, highlighting ecosystem connections
  • Watching wikibase.cloud from the distance
• mwcli (which really needs a new name)

I look forward to attending the 2025 Wikimedia hackathon in Istanbul to meet people one again, and continue with these 2 projects, and more.

2024 saw me write 18 blog posts, down from 25 last year, and continuing to primarily cover Wikimedia topics, things that crop up in my day to day computing (including at work), and now also smart home topics!

Top 10 for 2024 were:

1. Installing Android Studio on WSL2 for Flutter (again #1 ➡️)
2. Smart home: Starting with OPNSense Router, Eero Wi-Fi and a pile of cables (🆕 written at the end of 2023)
3. If you have a sandwich and cut it in half, do you have one or two sandwiches (🆕 written at the end of 2023)
4. Python3, Using some shared state in 2 async methods (was #2 ⬇️)
5. Add Exif data back to Facebook images – 0.10 (was #4 ⬇️)
6. WSL2 COM port pass-through with usbipd (firewall issues) (🆕 written in 2024)
7. See all Windows 11 network data usage (🆕 written at the end of 2023)
8. VSCode & PHP XDebug from Localhost, WSL2 and Docker containers (was #3 ⬇️)
9. Avoid image indexing in robots.txt (🆕 new in the top10)
10. Your own Wikidata Query Service, with no limits (was #6 ⬇️)

Quite a few new posts appearing, and I’m hopeful that smart home topics will end up being rather interesting for folks, and also fun to write.

I still seem to be keeping up with my open source contributions (primarily on Github), with apparently 947 public “contributions” in 2024, down from 3,368 in 2023, which makes sense as my full-time job is no longer open source work.

It’s okay though, I’ll always have my WallOfgreen account checking the reliability of Github Actions, that can provide me with a better screenshot. (Looks like one run was cancelled for some reason this year claiming “GitHub Actions has encountered an internal error when running your job.”)

On this day, 1 year ago, I was walking around my house with a thermal imaging camera seeing what was hot, and what was not.

Until next time!