A remarkably terrible year

I haven't written anything here for nearly 5 years, let alone an end of year summary - last one was 2004 I believe! But 2023 has been a remarkably terrible year, so thought it was worth a commemorative diary entry.

I haven't posted since 2019 though, so it feels like a quick recap is in order.

2019 was pretty great, no complaints - just very busy with work and dealing with my young child.

2020 was not so great. There was this pandemic thing. Boris let the Cheltenham horse racing go ahead, which led to a massive outbreak of COVID in the town, and both Leela and child caught it before lockdown - Leela was one of the NHS staff sent onto the COVID ICU without being fit-checked for her mask, but turned out that was fine because she was already infected. I caught it off them, was in bed for a day or two. Thankfully we all recovered.

But then nursery closed, and suddenly we had to juggle my full time job, my wife's terrifying and exhausting job, and full time childcare. Everyone around me was getting furloughed but as CTO at an all-remote company with clients who needed urgent COVID-related changes, I was busier than ever - for most of the first lockdown I was only getting my hours in thanks to working evenings, weekends, and during child's nap time. Leela would get home late from the hospital to glares and comments from neighbours about why wasn't she banging her pots for the NHS. Then later in the year Wildfish was sold, and my role as CTO grew to running all the day-to-day. We were broken, but somehow kept everything on the rails.

People joke that we're entering 2020 v4, but it really does feel like that. Life has been relentless, and at Radiac Towers we seem to be playing on hard mode. By 2022 we had generated an additional child, and we had no idea that 2x the children means 10x the work, especially with no family nearby to help. After the 3 years of pandemic and working all hours it was time for a change. I decided to cut my hours to get more time with my children, and to move back to being a dev.

After being picky and looking round for half the year, I found a startup that sounded perfect and joined in September. I then had 3 months of what I can only describe as professional hell. I won't go into details, but suffice it to say it was not a good place to work. I was let go by email at 8pm on Boxing Day, 4hr before my probation period would have ended and I'd have qualified for shares. Of a company of 12, I was one of 6 they let go in a similar way over 6 months. The startup folded a few months ago

So that catches you up - I went into 2023 as a 39 year old with no job. I'd like to say January was spent leaping into job hunting with excitement, but being honest it was mostly spent trying to figure out what had just happened. I decided to go back to freelancing and contracting, figuring the independence would be welcome, and gaps would be useful for working on side projects. I set up new ltd and lo, Uzeweb was back! Then my dad found out his cancer treatment had failed, and he likely had 6-12 months left.

I turned 40. I picked up a few intense but great short-term contracts over the year, but instead of spending my down-time working on projects as I'd planned, I spent most of it either looking for the next contract or visiting my dad. I did get time to branch out into rust a bit, which was great fun, and I worked on some of my current open source projects - docker0s and django-fastview didn't quite make it over the finish line, but I did publish django-fancy-formset.

My dad passed away in August, so most of July to September was spent either there or on the phone trying to sort things out. I'm the only one left in the family now, so although there were people who helped, organising the funeral was ultimately my responsibility. That was an experience - I'll probably write about that in a bit.

I'd been introduced to a fantastic client in September and didn't want to let it slip by, so said I'd start 3 days after my dad's funeral. In hindsight that was... optimistic. I thought it would be fine - I'd had a cold functional detachment with his loss right up til the funeral, but after I'd spent a week going through his documents to write the eulogy, piecing together his life from memories and letters and newspaper clippings, the day of the funeral hit me a lot harder than I'd expected. Not helped that I'd also had to start going through my mum and gran's stuff - when they passed away ~20 years ago, I put all their stuff in my dad's loft to "sort out later". Oops.

So I started the big new project with mental baggage, my dad's complicated estate to sort out, a back room full of boxes of documents and photos, and two young and difficult children. The past few months have been incredibly stressful, trying to juggle all of that with providing a good service at work in the day. It has been a challenge.

I wish I could say I had hopes for a brighter 2024, but with the global issues and the things we're juggling at home, the best I can manage is cautious optimism. There are reasons for hope: I'm starting the year with a job, and I've got a plan for navigating the big issues I can see coming - making progress with my dad's estate, balancing work and home, losing weight and improving my health - but if the past 4 years have taught me anything, it's that you can't predict the future.

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