by Leon Rosenshein

Another Year In Review

snowman with falling snow animation
It’s the last day of the year and time for my annual look back. It’s been a busy year. At home, at work, and on the blog.

On the work front, at the beginning of the year I had just started working from home again because of the Marshal Fire. A few weeks later cleaning was finished and I started working from the office again. There weren’t many people there, but it was good to not work alone. Two weeks later I started a new job. Luckily it was just down the street, and I could still walk to work. There was (and still is) a lot to learn, but I’ve come up to speed and I’m enjoying the work. About a month ago I got a new manager. Same role, same job, same everything, just a new manager. And now, at the end of the year, our local office is being closed. We all still have jobs. Nothing changed with that. I’ll just be working from home until the powers that be decide which of the other 2 nearby offices I’ll be working from.

On the home front, we were temporarily living with our daughter because of the Marshal Fire. Luckily all we had to do was spend a few nights away from home. We did do some smoke remediation, but that didn’t have much impact. On the other hand, we did a bunch of renovations this year. New master bathroom. Hardwood floors all around. New coat of paint everywhere, except the kitchen/family room, which are still to be done. That meant living with my daughter again, this time for a month. But we’re back in the house now, and loving what we did, so it was worth the trouble.

On the blog front, it was a mixed bag. At the beginning of this year my blog was a set of Confluence pages on Aurora’s internal network. It was easy to publish to, but not very visible, and I was about to lose access to it, so something had to change. I looked around at options and settled on Hugo as the site generator, with S3 as the backing store and CloudFront as the web server. The raw data is stored in GitHub and I use GitHub actions to build/copy to S3 when things change. Once I got it set up it’s just worked. Since you’re reading this, it’s working, and it only costs ~$0.25/month, I’d say it’s worth it. Along the way I made some updates to the theme I’m using to support for the OpenGraph protocol and Mastodon as a social media provider. If you’re interested in learning how it all works let me know.

From a content production standpoint though, not as big a year as some. I only added 90 entries this year, so my average (~1.7/week) is a little lower than the 2/week I wanted. On the other hand, I did get the Engineering Stories part of the site up and running, with some archtypes and my own story there for viewing. That’s something I’m pretty proud of.

Speaking of Engineering Stories and the related articles, they’re right there at the top of this year’s most viewed articles. For your viewing pleasure, here’s the top 10 articles for this year:

And a few others I really liked:

Hopefully you’ve found those, and other, articles interesting and useful. I know I found writing them helpful in clarifying and cementing my own understanding of the topics. Until next year, Happy New Year, and remember to enjoy whatever you’re doing. We only get one shot at this life, so make it worthwhile.