As I pull the glossy gift wrap off an untarnished somewhat undamaged new year, I’m taking the opportunity to take a last look at the past year. This is an unusual reflection for me on successes and opportunities in my personal and professional life. I’ve never done this, but this year left a mark on me, and it needs sharing.

Theme

In the spirit of Cortex, I’ve also always struggled with the new year and setting goals for myself. Resolutions suck. I’ll admit, Cortex has somewhat changed my mind about this, and setting a theme to the year was just enough of the fresh approach I needed. One of the most interesting ideas for me, is that a theme is both a north star, and never completed.

A sane way to read RSS in 2023 🏴‍☠️

Man I really need to write on this blog more, it’s been far too long.

Heroku has made some questionable business choices recently, but the one thing they got dead-right straight out of the gate was ease of setup. With very little work, you could go from a working thing locally, add a couple files, and git push your way to a deployed environment. That simple interaction made so much complexity go away, I think many hosting services are still after the bar that Heroku set so early. A bunch have even gotten there, and acknowledge that it’s no longer 2010.

Oh mixpanel.

After looking for far too long for a way in the Mixpanel docs to find a way to track session-end events with the Mixpanel JS library, I tried all the usual tricks to get the tracking event to fire correctly, beforeunload, unload and similar. Nothing was firing correctly. Having heard fairly recently about the beacon API, I thought “Yeah, there’s no way there’s support for that in recent stuff yet”.

I’ve added a uses page to this site so it could be submitted to the totally excellent (and super fascinating) uses.tech. I’m fascinated with the tools that people use to do their job, and it was pretty interesting to collect a list of all the crazy stuff I use to get my job done. I spend a lot of time at my desk, and seeing how other people set up their spaces and what they use has been cool