⚓ Preamble

Prompted by Michaël Le Barbier's kind inquiry into progress on my upcoming test framework,
I had begun informally producing yearly reports in this thread, which now live here henceforth.

⚓ 1 january 2026

Happy New Year!!

So, 2025 has been a very productive year, I mostly don't remember the details (many of which involved important upgrades to the HTML across all my websites)
but the two most important user-visible releases have been hexstream.link (a partial list of such links is here) and my Common Lisp Pitch Thing. (See more context on LinkedIn.)
I also announced a truly epic upgrade to the HexstreamSoft Sponsors log, which will of course be my first big databasification.

I am continuing to experience some pretty good success on LinkedIn, now with 14000+ connections/followers and several dozens of very successful comments this year alone,
and I also started posting more main posts and getting some success there as well. My launch of The Great Common Lisp Revival before 2030 will be truly epic!!

Major changes to my life starting towards the end of 2025:

I dropped Duolingo and uninstalled the app after a little over 4 years, finishing with a 1500 days streak.
I have no plans to use Duolingo again until I am ready to internationalize my websites.
I started playing the piano, one of my biggest childhood dreams that just can't wait anymore, especially since I almost died for no fucking reason in May 2023.
I started with Duolingo Music, which was nice to learn the individual notes, but I quickly upgraded to Simply Piano which is really great but normally pretty expensive,
but fortunately I got a nice 50% rebate for a year and I think I should be able to finish pretty much all the content in a year.

Stupidly falling for the hype, I bought the Duolingo Piano which I thought would be great to start,
but it turned out to be overpriced flimsy crap that breaks down like every 2 months so I'll have to return that shit for a refund,
and I bought a fairly high-end and full-featured but affordable beginner model instead (and I got a nice 100$ rebate thanks to Black Friday).
I am finally fixing my lackings in math with Brilliant. Highly recommended!!

I started on the free tier for 70+ days, it was pretty great since I could access all courses, but I was limited to 2 lessons per day;
on Black Friday there was a 30% rebate on a 12 months plan so I couldn't resist,
and I have already blasted through several courses already and am hoping to finish everything in under a year if possible.

Otherwise, I am superficially in much the same situation as exactly a year ago as described in the previous post, so simply refer to it and here is the diff:

Upgrading my JavaScript skills is done, except I now want to master JavaScript regexes enough to use them easily.
My immediate use-case is to parse HTTP ranges, which could easily be done by hand
but I decided to do it with a regex and always use them instead of manual parsing when appropriate henceforth.

I did learn CSS Grid, but I only used it in one place so far and it's trivial...
I'm sure CSS Grid will be extremely important one day for complex forms...

So, mostly just refer to the first big paragraph of the previous post for what I want to do in 2026...

I am expecting a HUGE, permanent productivity boost starting in 2026,
which should let me plow through my backlog much faster than usual.
I could theoretically achieve nearly 365 days of productivity per year!!!

That's because I believe I have achieved a critical point in optimizing my daily life schedule.
It's an incredibly simple but effective plan, so I think not much could possibly go wrong. (Famous last words?)

My awesome daily schedule is simply:

ALWAYS get out of bed at 8AM or earlier, ensured by always setting my alarm clock for that time,
being forced to get out of bed to go turn it off (and immediately turning it back on for the next day), and NEVER getting back into bed to rest some more.
I will thus be VERY motivated not to go to bed too late, preferably early enough that I will easily get out of bed even before the alarm clock rings out.
Morning is generally for hard productivity such as programming.
Afternoon is generally for soft productivity such as Brilliant and learning the piano.
After 4PM is for entertainment stuff such as YouTube.

I hope this is to your satisfaction...

I will post another assessment here on 1 january 2027.

⚓ 1 january 2025

Happy New Year!!

So, bad news! Unfortunately, I literally can't even start my unit testing framework in 2025. SORRY!!

2025 will be a truly insane year for me in terms of critical infrastructure upgrades,
most notably I will finally use a database after nearly 15 years of not using one, and I also need to implement a "Login with GitHub" system and then HexstreamSoft Sponsors 2.0.
I also need to upgrade from Debian 11 to Debian 13, which implies I must make a huge cleanup of my workstation and hopefully finally implement a sane backup procedure.
I also need to migrate everything from Cloudflare Pages to Cloudflare Workers + Assets in October, and I would like to add some new content and features and launch some new websites.
I am sure some unknown unknowns will further delay things as well.

Right now, I am massively upgrading my JavaScript skills since I just don't want to flail around while finally adding some dynamic backend stuff to my infrastructure which has been 100% static for nearly 15 years.
I am also about to finally learn CSS Grid, and I also need to finish a massive upgrade to the HexstreamSoft Sponsors log.

Hopefully I can get back to Common Lisp libraries development in 2026, but before I even start my unit testing framework, I need to release definitions-systems 4.0 and a new library it will depend on.

I'm frankly not even 100% sure I'll be able to start my unit testing framework in 2026, but I will post another assessment here on 1 january 2026.

I hope this is to your satisfaction...

⚓ 15 april 2024

I haven't yet created the repo, but I have fairly concrete ideas for it,
I think I already have a pretty good idea of what it will look like.

In terms of my public roadmap, I wouldn't be surprised if I just barely had time to finish HexstreamSoft Sponsors 2.0 in 2024.
I would say this is perhaps my second biggest project ever! (The biggest would be BahagonTools, which is no longer available.)
Incidentally, this is also my second "actual" web app with actual server-side components. (The first one again being BahagonTools.)

I will also be working on several infrastructural upgrades in 2024. These are not mentioned on my public roadmap.
Many of those upgrades will make it easier to implement HexstreamSoft Sponsors 2.0, or will otherwise make things easier for me.
I also have at least one very high-impact secret project slated for release in 2024 or 2025.

I am looking forward to releasing my great Common Lisp testing framework in 2025!