Annual Post

Time for the annual post - yes, I'm still alive! This year, as last year, was busy. I'm still working with Lincoln Loop, and still working on open source projects. I went to DjancoCon US again and gave another lightning talk about nanodjango - this time talking about improvements and the extra packages I've created around it, like django-style and django-nanopages. I also released nanodjango.dev, a site for nanodjango with an online playground to run Django entirely in the browser, and gave a full-featured talk about it all at PyCon UK. The sprints at both were great - I got to meet and work with several new people who submitted PRs, which was a fantastic experience, for me at least!

I've been working on some other projects, but mostly hit a wall with my open source after PyCon UK - I've not had much free time since, and the rise of AI has impacted my enjoyment of writing code for fun. I should write about that sometime. I'm sure I'll get back to it properly at some point, but I've mostly been chipping away at a rewrite of docker0s and trying to pretend coolify doesn't exist.

Outside work the year was exhausting - balancing kids at school with my job, and we did a load of work on the house. We finally fixed up the garden - we've tried in the past but bringing in a professional to deal with the bamboo made me realise the lawn and carpentry would be too much for me alone, especially with everything else going on in my life, so we got someone in. The garden is looking great now, but there are still a few things left for me to do, if I ever get time. We also had most of the house painted, the front door replaced, a car charger installed, light fittings re-done and new shutters installed.

Last on our list for the year was to sort out our floors; the previous owners had exposed the "original wood floor", which looked great on our viewings 8 years ago, but we realised they're actually the sub-floor, often chipped and splintered and always freezing cold, and the sealant between the boards had started falling out before we moved in, leaving holes straight down to the dirt - so we put engineered wood floor on top with plenty of insulation. It's much nicer to live with and looks great, but we're now terrified to walk on it or drop things, so maybe having a rubbish floor with two young kids wasn't so bad.

I expect 2026 to hold more of the same - there's still work to do on the house, still a lot of work to do on my projects, and still a lot of work to do on other things in my life (*still* struggling with my dad's estate over 2 years on!), but I'm cautiously optimistic.

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