2022 In Programming

By EricMesa

- 3 minutes read - 499 words

I started off the year mostly working on Python projects. For January and February I finally started making some great progress with understanding modern web frameworks and use of CSS frameworks rather than rolling my own. This not only helped with the Prophecy Practicum project, but would form the backbone to a lot of coding this year. I also wrote a utility to tally up my videos for my end of year video game roundup, saving me literal hours of time. As you can read from following the link above, I also worked on my long-running Extra Life Donation Tracker code.

I then took a break from coding during the months of March and April. I was running lots of races at the time and training for the Brooklyn Half-Marathon as well as focusing on my other hobbies.

In May, June, and July I came back to programming with a vengeance. It was pretty heavy in Circuit Python work as I did some quality of life improvements to my Adafruit MagTag weather project, fixed some connection disruptions with my Adafruit FunHouse, and restarted work on my Smoker Thermostat. I also added a web UI to my Civ VI Webhook program, added a UI for logging with my Extra Life Donation Tracker, added remote culling in my btrfs snapshot program, and fixed my Dreamhost DNS program to make it more robust.

In August I found out that I needed to modify my Amortization program because of changes to numpy. I also made the CLI output prettier thanks to using rich. I did some work on my Extra Life Donation Tracker again and tried to work on a fork of ClanGen (which ultimately led nowhere). But my biggest changes were once again with the Civ VI Webhook. I migrated from using JSON files to using MongoDB. This led to some greater efficiencies as well as allowing me to more easily jump between servers for better uptime. I also learned how to use HTMX which allows you to get some interactivity to your sites without having to learn Javascript.

In September I tried to rewrite my Dreamhost DNS program in Go and failed due to the way Go does JSON parsing. In October I mostly focused on a bunch of Quality of Life improvements to the Prophecy Practicum project. But I did also do some work on Advent of Code. November was light on programming, but I did make a script to post my top last.fm weekly listens to Mastodon. Finally, December was all Advent of Code.

Looking back over the year, it was mostly a year of refinements to long-running projects. I’ve got a suite of tools that I use pretty consistently or are used by others and this was a great year to add some spit and polish to those projects. I also learned a lot more than I thought I ever would about how modern web design works. I’m very curious to see what I work on in 2023.