David Hunter

Coming in 2023...

In this blog article, I will lay out what I hope the new year will bring.

A Look Back at 2022

The year started off kinda rocky, with pressures increasing and mental health and wellbeing decreasing. Towards the middle of the year, things started to settle and become more stable and manageable, and then the issues became practically non-existant towards the end of the year.

I somehow found the motivation to clean out a whole heap of stuff I no longer needed from my bedroom. Heap is probably too small a word when you look at how much was cleaned out, but it will do for now. I had stuff dating back to primary school, which certainly wasn't yesterday, and just shows how badly I needed to get this done. Most of the old stuff is gone now, and my room is much more organised than it has been in the past couple of decades.

Also in 2022, I explored some older technologies that were once part of my life until replaced by newer technologies. Just because something is old and has a better replacement, doesn't mean its no good. I wanted to go back to these older technologies and explore them better, so I started playing some of my parent's old Vinyl Records and Cassette Tapes, and some of my old Video Tapes. For christmas this year, I treated myself to a new cassette player and video player so I could try out these formats again. I also wanted to go back to old gaming consoles, so I treated myself to a couple of PlayStation consoles, the first one and the second one, along with some games to play.

Over the course of several months, I was looking into the benefits to having static sites online. Most of my web projects are mostly static, meaning they only change when I change the code and publish it, and I often used PHP to keep the same design across the entire site, and that PHP code was executed upon every page request. This is bad practice and so I wanted to change it. I had heard of Static Site Generators and found out they let you code in a dynamic way to do things like keep the same design on every page and loop though content to save duplicate code and to make development easier, exactly like how I had been doing with PHP, so for a while now, my web projects have been entirely static, and the only content on the servers is the generated finished result. No PHP execution, just the server sending the content to the user requesting it. This saves time and computational power which both increases the user experience and also saves money for the developers and site owners.

Moving forward and into 2023

I plan on continuing what I have already started in 2022. My bedroom will hopefully get a complete makeover by the end of 2023, I will continue expanding my collection of Vinyl Records, Cassette Tapes, and Video Tapes, as well as continuing to play old games on the PS1 and PS2.

Hopefully if I continue to save money like I have been doing, I will afford to get new Laptop and Desktop computers, because they both are in need of an upgrade. Laptop dates back to 2012 so is more than a decade old now and is extremely slow and battery doesn't work anymore, and my desktop dating back to 2015 if memory serves me, cos its not really as fast as it should be, and isn't really suited to the computational needs of today. With more power, I can get more done both cos the machines themselves will be faster but also because they are more powerful. I also want to explore virtualisation technologies more, and to do that I need a really decent computer with a bit of power as I may need to run multiple virtual machines at once on the same host machine.

Assuming the negative things from 2022 don't come back in 2023, then I also see me doing more web-based projects to practice my skills in both Web Design and Web Development, with a higher focus on Front End projects and static content.

Conclusion

Regardless of what happens, all I hope for is good health for everyone and for things to go well. Hopefully things turn out as I plan.

Keep an eye on this blog for more updates on how things are going. Take care.