2024
Well.
Maybe not the best year. Mother in law passed away kind of unexpectedly. She'd been coming up to stay with us quite often and it sucks. I was under-employed and on the job market for most the year too which was like a constant low level of stress and anxiety. Kids are good and we're healthy and happy though so things are looking up.
My artistic practice continues to wane and I don't really know what to do about it. Maybe that's just the curse of being a not quite-artist. I spend a lot of time thinking about making art though.
I had a lot of great time in the backyard.
I got a job
I was on the job market for 10 months which was wild. I ended up applying to 332 software engineering jobs with 7% resulting in interviews, five of which were full interview processes with takehome projects/challenges. 2 processes declined because I didn't have experience in agile methodologies which is a very funny dealbreaker. I wish I had some big takeaway from the whole experience but I think the market is just saturated with good talent right now.
I can say though I'm good at coding challenges and live coding under pressure. I stopped doubting my resume and I have a very strong self intro.
In the end I got a role as a Senior Software Engineer building design software for the printing industry, which is something I had a big prior interest in - so maybe this whole ordeal really was for the best!
I built a chicken coop
In April we got 12 chicks from the farm supply store and I set out to build a coop before they got too big.
I looked at a lot of plans online but ended up just designing it in Blender which was really fun.
The build was very fun too, I've never framed a structure and I enjoyed puzzling out how put it together by myself.
There's a skirt of metal hardware cloth that extends a few feet underground, this is in case of predators that can dig although we haven't had any breakin attempts as far as I know.
Very proud of the final product!
The chickens are doing great and were laying 10 eggs a day towards the end of the summer.
I did a lot of vegetable gardening
The garden did great this year and I spent a lot of time tending it and prepping & eating vegetables. I just find it extremely relaxing and rewarding. I wrote a blog post that gets into a lot of details.
I saw some cool insects
Invasive but very cool Chinese mantis, Brood XIX cicada, Cicada Hawk wasp
8 Spotted Forester moth, a large Sphynx moth of some kind, a normal cicada, and a Monarch butterfly which are getting rarer to see.
I saw the total solar eclipse and the northern lights
We drove down to the path of totality and witnessed a full eclipse which was wild. Then we took the kids camping which was a blast.
I also saw faint red aurora during the solar event, so I guess a good year for celestial events.
I started working on a local note taking app
'Localnotes' is a single html file note taking app you can open in your browser that saves notes in local storage. Eventually I want it to have nested/interlinked notes, code blocks, and ability to 'export' a set of notes as a zip of html files.
It's really useful in it's current state, I keep one open right next to my email tab
I participated in #Looptober
This was my 6th #looptober. October was very busy because of my new job but I was able to do 13 songs. I switched DAW from Reason to Reaper on linux which was a lot of fun to pick up and I feel will serve me much better in the years to come.
My favorite pieces:
- Free Rider
- Here Come The Cows
- Hello Trees
I got into miniature hobby sculpting
I did a little 2 inch goblin figurine for goblin week and a friend pointed me to the Indie Miniature Makers Collective discord, which is a very cool place and helped get me into miniatures. Most of these are some variety of 2 part epoxy (greenstuff a.k.a kneadatite, milliput, or tamiya epoxy). Sometimes I cut it with plasticine.
And I did a few sketches here and there
