It's January first, and time to look back on 2023 before the New Year cynicism wears off…

The best thing I can say about the New Year is that I'm glad December 2023 is finally over. What a terrible month of sickness, injury, weather, isolation, and drabness. On the plus side, I'm alive and eating cereal on summits, have an awesome family, and I'm not getting bombed or shot at at any point of my daily life. So that's all definitely a plus. From a narcissistic perspective, though, 2023 feels like a bit of a let down. I mean what actually happened, from a narrative perspective? I went on an awesome holiday in June, which now only serves to make me melancholy that I'm not on a holiday galivanting around Europe every other day of my life. Everything else about life feels kind of the same. I still have injuries. I still feel creatively unfulfilled. Now that I'm a year older, do I have anything to show for it?

Some things from 2023 that made me feel alive…

Working 4 Jobs At Once

Maybe a slight exaggeration, but I have most definitely encountered other humans in the workforce that put in less effort at one organisation than I did times four in early parts of 2023. And I'm not a proponent of hustle culture or anything like that. All my efforts were under a single position and salary as a consultant. What made me feel alive about this situation was the insane processing power that my brain reached, beyond even what I thought was possible. I recall one morning I had four 30 minute meetings in a row across the four different assignments. Meetings I was running. And each meeting ran over, meaning zero seconds for context switching before I jumped onto the next Teams call. Over hours I spoke about electoral boundaries and nomination processes, then higher education research programs and publicity for publications, into hospital systems and business continuity patterns, into justice system principles such as the difference between court bail and police bail. People would ask me questions and my mouth was answering correctly while my brain was still trying to understand the problem. And I was right, four times in a row, I added value and advanced projects and I felt useful.

Finished a Short Story

At 9,400 words my latest short story - and only story of 2023 - took nearly a year to write and went through multiple phases of abandonment until I finished the first draft, then the second, then the third. And then I felt it, the endorphins, the satisfaction of weaving all these elements of a story together for a satisfying payoff with consistency, engageable characters, and rich storytelling. Those aren't my words, I read the story to my writers group and they all liked it. That made me feel creative and connected to the rest of the world.

32,000 Users in a Single Day

I've spent a lot of my nights programming on projects that have little traction with the wider world (such as this one) or never get deployed to Prod. Programming pursuits for me are direct competitors for creative writing. I have ideas for websites or utilities I want to make but often fail to fully deliver. I started FT last October and it went live without much fanfare back in May. Since then I have invested many hours adding new features, improving SEO, improving Analytics Integration, and adding Generative AI content.

This has always been an agile project, so it lives on as long as the product owner (me) has ideas for the engineers (also me). But if we are talking about measures of success, I think tracking dozens of people using it simultaneously at the same time as I heard fireworks outside my window was a good one. Waking up New Years Eve morning and seeing thousands of simultaneous users was an even bigger one. I had 31,900 users in a single day. That's more than bradism.com has probably had since 2005. Not only that, but the code itself all worked under load. There were no new errors in the logs, no slow response time. I felt proud and accomplished.

I am not using ad revenue as a measure of success, as the high traffic and click through rate actually caused the chocolate factory to suspend ad content around 5pm, dramatically limiting my earnings. However, having such a successful revenue spike - 3000% over my daily average for December - is kind of a measure of success in itself.

Venice

I mean, the whole month of Europe was almost peak human existence. There were a few occasions where I was disappointed by not being able to find a painting in a gallery or missing out on a ferry ride around a lake (and many short beds), but these moments were so minor, as fleeting as my own existence in this giant universe, that I have to think hard to recall them. What I mostly remember was feeling free and piqued. The scenery was gorgeous. The history and culture on display was fascinating. I was in control just enough such that every day felt like an adventure without ever being scary.

What I also enjoyed about this trip was that the longer it went on the better my body felt. My back and hamstring and especially my wrist all unclenched from their constant nagging and pain. Maybe it was the relaxation, maybe getting away from computer screens, who knows. Twelve months on from my SLB surgery in 2022 I was using my wrist for lugging suitcases and cameras up mountains and stairs and along cobbled streets. I felt rewarded for all the hours of rehab and stretching and strengthening I'd been so disciplined at performing each week.

Paying Someone To Upgrade My Shower

For over three years in my current house I tolerated the shitty showerhead in the cramped, falling apart shower cubicle we had in our bathroom. In early 2022 I bought a replacement shower head to install, but I lacked the confidence to drill holes in tiles to install it. Eventually when the screen door fell off enough times I finally went through a process of researching replacement options, getting quotes, negotiating a price and time, arranging installation and then having holes drilled for my new shower head as well. None of this was exceptional or special. It was just a normal, everyday process of interacting with traders in a modern society and the fact that I executed it made me feel like I was a valid member of said modern society. Also standing under that new showerhead in that new, roomy shower cubicle with hot water hitting not one but two shoulders at the same time felt luxurious.

Runner Ups

Walking up hills. Generating perfect content in bulk instantly with the right GPT prompt. The times my dog does something awesome. Sunset walks with my wife. Coffee of the right strength, heat and volume just when my body needs it most.

However

Through no fault of my own, of the four jobs I was working in May - one project was delayed indefinitely, one went nowhere, one took six months to go somewhere, one I was cut out of completely for commercial reasons. I invested a lot of time and energy into IT projects in 2023 and I feel like not a lot actually made it to production enough to leave me satisfied. Except FT, where an idea for a feature can be designed, built, tested and deployed in a matter of hours. Sadly, the suspension of my ads on New Years Eve did give me a sour taste about that whole thing. So much effort that finally hits a jackpot, and then the whim of some basic counting algorithm ruins it all.

I submitted my new story to my dream market and it was rejected within 12 hours. Did they even read it? Probably not. Did I receive a reminder of why creative pursuits are completely unrewarding? Probably yes.

As good as Summer number one in June was, by Summer number two in December my injuries had returned. Sickness ruined nearly every plan I had. Meanwhile, another year around the sun - and the books I read during it - were only making it clearer to me how inconsequential my existence is. As the universe continues to scale horizontally and vertically, I am a mere spec and it's becoming more apparent that I do not contribute anything unique and valuable to the world. I do not improve society. I do not create art or tools that really enrich the human canon. I can barely interact with my peers. After all that, I'm basically where I was twelve months ago.

At least it's still nice under the showerhead. That hasn't been ruined for me yet. And it was still better than 2022.

Bradismlocks was taking a walk through a winter and came upon a house in a wet, cold part of the space-time continuum. This was very tiring. In the house there were three months. Bradismlocks tried June, which was amazing - it was warm, and there was a lot of adventure and delicious foods and not much joint pain. "This month is too awesome," said Bradismlocks. Next month was July. July was cold, dark, filled with work and not much adventure. "This month is too not-awesome," said Bradismlocks.

Bradismlocks tried the third month - August. The bed was not just right. The porridge was not just right. The chairs were not just right. Bradismlocks realised with horror that June was actually just right and that it was not possible to go back. At least now August was over, along with this journal entry...

I added better image zoom and optimisation to Bradism today, after June 2023 cracked 100mb page load. Other than that, nights are essentially as above.

There was a study this week that showed a correlation between consumption of magnesium and brain size. I was pleased to read this because, as the Bradism archives will attest, I am a huge almond stan. Unfortunately, I cannot find the exact entry from my early life where I discovered the benefits of almonds (by trying to eat half a kilogram of them on a train ride home) because a lot of my older entries are removed due to my childhood ignorance and dumb opinions.

Of course, having consumed more reasonable volumes of almonds in the decades following, I instantly correlated that my dumb childhood Bradisms might actually have been because of my low almond consumption! It would explain a lot, like my terrible grammar back then. And driving a VK Commodore until 2007.

The passing of time can cloud a lot. I think I've been remembering myself as a smart kid, but now with context maybe I've only become smart since I started eating almonds?

I assume that a larger brain size results in higher intelligence. I only read the headline of the study.

At the start of the summer of 05/06 I successfully won a programming job as a sole contractor to develop a website for a guy who posted on my University IT's message group looking for programmers. As I had literally implemented bradism.com v1 a few months earlier I felt confident I had the experience with which to deliver a complete content management system with payment gateway integration and dynamic language selection among other features in eight weeks. This was not the first time a combination of ego, ignorance and she'llberight got me into trouble, and what I eventually delivered as "95% complete" (and therefore 5% underpaid) would undoubtedly be some of the worst PHP code that was every put into a live environment and exposed to the internet.

Over the years I sometimes thought about that site, which searches on Ask Jeeves confirmed did not seem to exist for very long. However, the experience was foundational in quickly teaching me a few critical lessons about using things like supported libraries and unit tests and source code management and a multitude of other IT concepts that are now part of my life as an IT Professional.

When I was signing the contract for my new job last month I did notice that the group which owns the company I was joining bore the same name as the guy who'd hired me seventeen years ago. I poked around quickly online to see if there was a connection, but it seemed like I was clear. Then today in the kitchenette I bumped into a seventeen years older version of that guy who definitely did remember me. He told me that the site was up for less than a month before high data bills triggered him to check the status of it and he found it had been completely hacked and was now serving copious amounts of pornography at his expense. Thus, it died. I would guess either an image upload exploit or maybe some SQL injection was its downfall.

So apparently he has, at least indirectly, hired me again. Maybe this is fate, or perhaps it is just Adelaide things. Perhaps the seeds of those lessons from 2006 will be the fruit that repays him in 2022. That would make me feel better about the fact that my adult life features a goddamn seventeen year story arc.

And yes, the original version of bradism.com also got completely hacked in 2006 and now utilises supported libraries and frameworks.

As I have been back from holidays for five days and haven't done any coding for more than that, plus now that I have a new camera, tonight I decided to eat a Maxibon and add full screen overlay mode for large images on my site.

I have a 2022 Keep note with a list of potential journal entry titles, and after a while it became a list of journal entries that I didn't get around to writing.

This list includes "Yest We Forgot" - which was some thoughts I had after seeing a little war memorial in the suburbs last ANZAC day with no wreaths on it, as well as a note admonishing me for not writing a review of Phil Jackson's autobiography "11 Rings".

It also had an entry called "Crossroads" which was a hint to start me writing a potential entry in late May about if it was time for bradism.com to make a left or right turn, maybe start writing more entries about evaluating your API Strategy and ways to assess an organisation's integration maturity. Given that June's entries focused mainly on injuries, zooper doopers, the weather and photos of the garden it's clear that bradism.com ploughed on straight ahead without slowing to yield, and my decision not to reflect on my decision at these crossroads seems justified as I didn't hit anything and I'm still going in the same direction. What the fuck am I talking about? I got acquired by a big consulting firm, I tried working for a big consulting firm, I decided I preferred working for small consulting firms and so after a few months of business development, pitches and invoicing I had my last day today. Well, officially my last day is in two weeks, but I have some leave to take between now and then. During which we're going for a road trip which, due to Adelaide being a long road away from anywhere, will involve a lot of roads, but not many crossroads.

If it's the March long weekend, and there are production and provisioning changes happening for multiple clients, then...

This is obviously the perfect time for me to also deploy to production the latest version of bradism.com

I mean, I've got the equivalent of over one working hands to juggle these things.

In all seriousness, writing last minute features such as dynamically scaling the CSS padding of entries over faded image backgrounds when viewed on mobile was important.

If it wasn't, what is my life really even for?

End If