Year End Musings and Ramblings

I don't do "New Year's Resolutions." I also apparently don't blog much anymore as evidenced by the dearth of posts here last year. But today I felt strangely compelled to write some words here as I've been realizing that something has been bugging me the past year and I think I need to try to do something about it.

The thing that I've been realizing is that I've been feeling very bored understimulated over the past year. The obvious thing that I can point to that I feel is contributing to this is my day job, where my role has now shifted into a full System Admin / DevOps person where I sling YAML and other config files almost all of my day. I have to admit that I find this type of work extremely unfulfilling when it's almost 100% of my day-to-day work. My role shifted a bit midway through the year due to some events that occurred at the company I work at. Previously I was doing this type of work just part of the time with some ability to delve into software development still here and there. I was fine with that particular arrangement and knew up front that this is what the role would be when I was interviewing for it. I actually really like being able to wear multiple hats (one of the reasons that overall I prefer working at small companies, or, if it has to be a big company, is one where I am on a team that has full ownership / autonomy) and I do have an interest in systems administration / DevOps work. But I also remember saying something along the lines of "If I had to work with YAML all day, I'd be very sad" during my interview. Unfortunately for me it seems like this is what my role now has turned into, and with the current and future workload, I don't see that changing anytime soon.

A side-effect of this I wasn't totally prepared for was, at least for me, that this almost daily "unfulfillment" leaves me feeling very drained at the end of the day. Probably because it's been such a prolonged thing. As a result, I haven't worked on any of my side-projects at all this year.

I'm of course very happy to have a job at all in this economic climate and I can honestly say that the company I am currently working at is pretty good overall (I feel it is especially important for me to acknowledge this as in recent years I've had a couple big stinkers!). But even still, I feel like I'm in more then a little bit of an "intellectual rut" lately that I need to try to break out of.

So my "totally-not-a-New-Year's-resolution" promise to myself is that 2025 is going to be a year in which I really force myself to resume working on some of my side-projects. I feel like it's really important to myself to try to build something and be able to enjoy that feeling of accomplishment.

This is going to be an uphill battle as I've no idea how to address the "feeling drained at the end of the day" problem (outside of another personal goal of mine for the year to commit to a daily exercise routine ... again, "totally-not-a-New-Year's-resolution"!). I'm hoping that making some progress on any of my side-projects will have a bit of a snowball effect and renew some enthusiasm and help give me that evening energy to make some small bit of progress each week.

Of course the question is what to work on. Throughout the year there were two obvious areas to choose from, both in the retro-computing space because I still remain convinced that nothing will ruin my enthusiasm faster than trying to do some modern web development type of project in my spare time, given my thoughts on the current state of the industry and modern development practices.

The first obvious choice that comes to mind coincides with the topic of my last post here written almost a full year ago. I have that fancy Foenix F256K to play around with still, and actually last month the Foenix A2560K that I ordered in April 2022 finally arrived.

However, I don't think I will be playing with either of those, at least, not in the short term. In fact, I will admit that I just put both of them back in the box and on a shelf in my closet just an hour or so ago. The reasons why are very long and I don't really want someone in this community randomly finding this place one day and seeing me doing nothing but complaining.

What I will say is that I think the Foenix community has a problem that is rooted in there being too many different hardware devices that are being seemingly deprecated too quickly.

For example, there are now four devices in the A2560-line (with the addition of the just recently announced A2560M) and from what it seems like based on recent Discord chatter, the older three (including the A2560K I just received after waiting two and a half years) will no longer be sold or produced. While the entire hardware line all has many similarities and it has been said that they will all still be supported by Stefany, I just don't think this constant hardware churn is helping improve the software support side of things. Right now there's only a very small number of people that understand enough of it to really help improve the foundation, and those people seem to be stretched incredibly thin. Adding more hardware devices to support is just pouring fuel on the fire.

I tried to dig into this a lot more myself, but found it frustrating, especially since there is a number of stability / memory corruption issues with the A2560's FoenixMCP software that is essentially the operating system. Trying to modify this code to help address gaps that I found annoying with the development workflow was another exercise in frustration as there seem to be multiple different forks of this software for different toolchains and hardware all in various states of "pre-beta-ness". Even just re-building the specific fork for my specific device from the original source code with zero alterations and expecting to get an identical, working build is apparently wishful thinking as I found out for myself. I actually spent a lot of time over the past two weeks investigating this and coming away empty-handed. So, I just threw up my hands today finally and realized that this isn't what I want to spend my time on. Especially since over the last week yet another new device (the A2560M) was announced. I just don't see the situation getting better over the short term, so I'm just going to put these devices aside for now and wait and see.

There is more that I could write on this topic, but I think you get the gist of it.

This is all a shame, as I think Stefany and others in the community are clearly very talented, and I think there is a lot of potential in this hardware. I think they just need to find a way out of this "shiney new toy" syndrome and focus on what exists today.

So! That leaves me with my second choice of area of side-projects to work on which is to return to MS-DOS, where at least, that platform and hardware is very stable since it's a dead platform, heh.

I had been working on a "GDlib" game development library for Turbo Pascal which was used in the Fruit Popper! game I made and didn't quite finish. In late 2021 I had been doing a bunch of work on that and I can see that my last commit to that project was in December 2021, which is far too long ago. I'd love to resume work on that and create a bunch of small demo games for it and release it.

As well there is the "libdgl" library that I had been working on with Watcom C/C++ which was going to be for more advanced DOS projects of mine (where I might find working within the confines of DOS's segmented memory model a bit limiting).

So I think my plan for 2025 is to dust off my DOS side-projects and bring some of them to life with actual games instead of just always fiddling with never-ending library development.