Have you ever had a "boring" year? Uneventful one? The one to forget? And then, have you had a year so packed (for better or for worse) you start to yearn for that boring time you had. Those moments always feel like a one time thing, despite occurring more than once throught a decade or two.

I can definitely say that I'm bad at keeping focus. You know this too, if you ever met me. It was the problem in school, observed by both my parents and teachers. I know I can easily switch focus to random ideas even now, which may hurt my work pace or my pet projects (100% of which are created by the moment of switching focus).

What keeps bugging me about this is how the hell I haven't lost focus from programming through all these years? With all the temporarity of my brain, this one hobby just happened to stick with me. So many other hobbies just felt apart. My desire to keep coding and make things for fun is pretty much at the same level as it was back when I was 10. Maybe even higher now!

Exactly 1 year ago I was full of excitement to announce that this website is going to be my blog. At the time my workload was at the lower end as the company was heading towards inevitable shutdown, one way or another. Little did I know how things may turn the following year! I got married, I got a new job, I had to travel quite a bit, many new things to learn, so many different new things to code.

At each of that moment I believed that this new hobby of blogging is here to stay, a thing that happened, perpetual. It was just those temporary distractions here and there that was taking a bit of time and focus. No, honey, our wedding was not a distraction! Looking back on this whole year, it was actually the new unpredictable pace of temporary events that was consistent as a whole, not the single thing I wanted to focus on.

Quite the opposite thing happened to some of my projects. I felt like I had some random sparks of focus to make some progress here and there. And it felt great. At the same time I realized that some of my projects getting quite old: dataclass is 7 years, picocolors is 3 years, and some other libraries I use occasionally are 2+ years as well. I can definitely say there are things that overall quite persistent in the long run.

Spotting perpetual and temporary events is a hard thing to do, apparently. One thing you can be certain about, the random examples of it never stop coming.

My grandpa passed away this year at the age of 82. It was the man I admired the most. I don't think it ever going to be easy to recover from this loss.

He spent his whole life living in the village. And as everyone living in a Ukrainian village, was expected to do a lot of farming. And he was so excellent at this. Cows, pigs, poultry, ducks, rabbits, potato, tomato, wheat, rye, corn, beet, melons, apples, apricot, strawberries, home wine, home vodka (obviously), beekeping. The list goes on and on. A self-sustained one-family enterprise, its own universe.

It was all architected, designed, and managed by one man. I grew up eating home meat, vegetables, honey. I would pick our home wine over any top Italian or French wine. None of those things from home ever had any competition on the market.

As far as my little life was going, the system my grandpa built felt eternal. The same things happening on schedule, every season. They may change a bit in variety or volume, but the process never stops. It was almost like it all was happening by itself, without enforcing. Everyone knows what to do and when.

Observing this as a kid tought me good lesson about hard work. If I had my mother as the prime example of hard worker I have to be, her prime example was grandpa. I saw her begging him to do less and take care of himself, and that's exactly what I ask her to do herself. I'm sure I'm next on the list and I'm sure I'll keep making their mistake.

What I love about him, is how uplifting it was to him to get tired after a day in the field. How proud he was about the yields, about the pigs eating well, all the little things that just come together nicely. I don't remember seeing him sad. I don't remember seeing him not in the mood, or lazy, or just not feeling it. He was always first to start, always the one till the end.

Now that he's gone, the enterprise essentially stopped. No, it's not like it can't function without one man. But there has to be someone to be the driving force of the whole thing. The leader. Without the leader, decisions can still be made, but those going to be temporary things to get through short time. He was the leader we needed.

I'm certain, the last things that my grandpa was thinking about were the things he needs to finish that week and what should be coming next. It definitely never was about just stopping or quitting. I'm happy he had never seen work of his life fail. He was always on top.

Rest in peace, grandpa. You will be perpetually missed.

I turned 30 this year. Quite a milestone for a human, right? Another milestone I'm having during this abnormally warm autumn months is 20 years of me writing code. That makes it 2/3 of my life spent in reading books, solving puzzles, thinking in abstract terms, trying to perfect Hello World. And I still enjoy doing it like I did in the very beginning.

For a long time I wanted to step up my programming journey by making a personal blog about it. You know, like cool kids do. Never really felt like I have something to write about though. Often thought that to make a blog is to be able to write those evergreen articles that inspire, bring new knowledge, articles that are useful.

The challenging part about finding those useful evergreen bits of knowledge is the fact the only constant thing in the industry is change. Tools, technologies, practices are getting obsolete, replaced, abandoned, falling out of fashion. My feelings towards those things may suddenly change as I keep learning something new. One day I'm willing to die on the functional programming hill. A year later I cringe about that past affection of mine.

There are plenty of amazing blogs I enjoy reading over the years: Code Simplicity, Red Blob Games, some particular essays I occasionally revisit like Programming Sucks, some essays that are the work of art like anything that Bartosz Ciechanowski writes. And many more of those blogs that keep my RSS feed far away from zero inbox. I have a lot of respect for those authors, their dedication and skill. But it is still hard for me to realize that they were not this good from the very beginning. They had their own starting point.

Not long ago I started making some pieces of software for my own convenience. Not libraries, not some cool puzzles either. But more practical things, some time one-off scripts. I got my own Hacker News client, because I wanted to better mobile experience and fewer distracting details. I wrote some Playwright scripts to automate some personal needs: mass blocking of assholes on Twitter, scraping IMAX seats for Oppenheimer, etc.

I got a lot better at getting these kind of things to some usable state, and not just leaving out at the idea stage. In part due to higher skills and better tooling, but also thanks to acknowledging that these things don't need to be universal or perfected. They just need to provide the least required convenience for myself only. I have become my own and only target audience.

After years of half-forgotten drafts and random notes on abandoned platforms, I think I understand what I can write about. I'd like to share some parts of my journeys that I find exciting at those moments, captured in details. Those details may remain disconnected and incomplete, but the least they need to do is to share just a bit more of my passion and attitude toward the thing I love doing the most. I hope here you will find something that we share passion about.

It has to start somewhere
It has to start sometime
What better place than here
What better time than now?
— Zack de la Rocha