Hello yet again my longuest active sponsor ever!!

Thank you for single-handedly holding the fort through some hard months!!

We reached 5000$ CAD in total revenues!

Without further ado, here is your annual report! :)

Twitter still sucks shit, no surprises there.

Mastodon will have to wait, as I simply don't have the time to set it up.
Unfortunately, Wildebeest is already an unmaintained project. :(
Maybe I should "just" write a Mastodon implementation in Common Lisp once I'm done with my roadmap?... 🤔

I'm still going strong on LinkedIn, now with 10000+ connections/followers!
The engagement there for me is simply batshit insane...

I'm still going strong on Duolingo, although I cut down on the competitive aspects by setting my profile to private
so as to opt out of the leaderboards as that was just wasting my time and actually preventing me from
properly progressing through the course and achieving my language learning goals.

I would normally have a 896 days streak on Duolingo,
but unfortunately I almost died for no reason in May 2023 and the long hospital stay broke my streak, so I only have a 253 days streak. :(

I again finished the Spanish course, as they had added quite a lot of material.
My (written) Spanish is now quite good, and I am hoping to achieve native-like proficiency in reading and writing within a few years.
I also made a Spanish friend! :)

Unfortunately, my Portuguese story is not quite so bright.
I finished Duolingo's Portuguese-from-Spanish course, but it's far too basic.
I want to complete the Portuguese-from-English course eventually, but for now I'm concentrating on improving my Spanish.

I had indeed joined the (Portuguese) Common Lisp Brasil channel on Telegram, it was great for a while
(despite my needing to use automated translation constantly for writing since my Portuguese skills were simply too low)
but then some stupid corruption shit happened and some stupid scammer who was somehow part of the admin team
banned me for no fucking reason and the channel's owner was too fucking spineless to do anything at all about it.
If that sounds completely retarded, that's because it is. On top of that, I found out the hard way that Telegram is broken by design.

Unfortunately, releasing my CLHS replacement in 2023 turned out to be completely impossible.
Well, à l'impossible nul n'est tenu...

I publicly announced my plans for HexstreamSoft Sponsors 2.0.

Admittedly I cut back on the weight lifting, as nearly dying has unfortunately left me at around 85% strength, perhaps permanently.
Oh well, that's still a lot better than 0%!

My advanced tmux config has of course long been completed, and is very comfortable!
I can easily make updates across dozens of projects at once!
Unfortunately, I believe the tmux development process has mostly collapsed under the weight of excessive Greenspunning.
I am dreaming of writing a tmux replacement in Common Lisp one day...

I did implement vast CSS loading and HTTP caching optimizations globally across all my websites,
and this has resulted in a glorious increase in performance, especially on first load.
Offline support will come much later.

(I note in passing that 2023 has been a truly BATSHIT INSANE year for CSS!
Some personal favorites are nesting, :has() and container queries.
These have been a long time coming and will be truly revolutionary for me once they reach Baseline Widely Available status!
And there is a lot of other recent CSS stuff I'm excited about, but let's move on...)

As it happens, my big sponsor recently came back after several months, with a nice promotion on top of that!
Apparently, 2023 was quite a ride for him. This seems common. :)

So, how was my 2023? Well, it's kind of a blur, really. My memory is kinda shit these days.
I do know I was very productive overall, but the almost-dying-for-no-reason thing monopolized a lot of my time and energy.

I learned a LOT about font technology, notably reading almost the entire FontForge manual!
Unfortunately, I don't have much to show for it concretely, but it's always nice to invest in learning fundamental and foundational technologies.
We couldn't even do anything non-trivial with computers without fonts!

I made some good progress towards releasing definitions-systems 4.0, another major update to my most important library.
This has been uncharacteristically hard, resulting in multiple dead-end private development branches,
but now I think the hard part is done and I know how to consolidate everything into a nice simple solution.

Some stupid shit happened, but I completely saved the situation by announcing the Common Lisp Symbol Nicknames Gold Rush!

Introducing my awesome consolidated English/French/Spanish/Portuguese keyboard configuration for desktop and mobile!
This is one of my most personally-important projects ever!
This completely supersedes and obsoletes my good English/French keyboard configuration for desktop
and my shitty English/French/Spanish/Portuguese keyboard configuration for mobile.

I also completely refactored the keyboard presentation, and added fallback layers to allow me to type Dvorak even in a QWERTY environment,
in case I'm ever temporarily stuck in a QWERTY-only environment such as BIOS setup.
(I also finally changed my mobile tap layout to Dvorak, so now I can safely completely forget QWERTY!)

I have not yet widely announced my new awesome keyboard layout, as I want to improve my advanced keyboard presentation even more, first.
Notably, I want to add options to select individual keys and to show the correspondance to a conventional keyboard,
as my new keyboard configuration is designed to logically map almost 1:1 to a conventional keyboard.
I also want an option to show scancodes. And I want to improve the feature descriptions...

Lastly, have a nice long look at my updated exciting roadmap, as that discloses many of my future plans.
I am very confident I will complete at least the first two items in 2024, and hopefully I can at least put a dent in the third one...

Beyond that, I want to start my professional blog in 2024.
And I'm sure I'll do a lot of other interesting stuff.

Anyway, that's about it! I hope this has been informative and exciting!
I'd love to know what you think! Have a great 2024!!

Hello again my longuest active sponsors ever!!

Thank you so much for your continued sponsorships!!

I won't recount you your accomplishments, you already know how awesome you are!

My finances have been a bit better than in previous years (mostly due to a lot of covid-related government help in Québec),
but your contributions are still very important from a moral support standpoint especially!

Ok, so first of all, indeed my main twitter account is still locked forever for no reason whatsoever.
I had thought that Elon Musk's "Amnesty" thing would solve that problem, but it seems not after all. Disappointing!

I have not yet started my inevitable migration to Mastodon,
as I have been experiencing MASSIVE UNEXPECTED SUCCESS on LinkedIn since late March 2022.
Now with 7000+ connections/followers, most of them programmers and related, Mastodon can wait! :)

(INSANE timing: Cloudflare actually announced "Wildebeest" just 2 hours ago! Interesting...)

The Common Lisp Open Source group on LinkedIn has also reached 1000+ members on 30 january 2023, up from 100-something in late March 2022.
This is the kind of growth I would like to see (and enact) in the Common Lisp community!
(I have also successfully invited 500+ new members to the Common Lisp group.)

I am still going strong on Duolingo, now with a streak of 531 days! I was again in the top 0.1% of users in 2022, of course.
I completed the Spanish course on 31 december 2022, and then immediately started tearing through
the Portuguese (from Spanish) course and had already completed 1/3 of the course a month later.
This is a bit time-intensive (like a part-time job), thus slowing down my operations, but the payoffs later will be HUGE!!!

I am indeed self-evaluating my current level of Spanish as "Limited Professional Proficiency",
or rather "Professional working proficiency" as it is now called these days it seems.
I had initially planned to learn Spanish to a more advanced level before starting to learn Portuguese,
but I figure knowing both languages at a good level would be much more useful than being extremely good at Spanish and not knowing Portuguese at all.
I also see that there is some sort of Portuguese Common Lisp community, which I am eager to join.

I will learn a FUCKTON of languages and spread the joy of Common Lisp to the entire world!

As of 1 august 2022, I have migrated ~100% of my web infrastructure to Cloudflare!
This is pure win, one of my best upgrades ever! Unfortunately, I have yet to introduce a build step.

I am still planning to release my CLHS replacement in 2023, now properly publicly announced.
With my now rather large audience on LinkedIn, its release is sure not to fall on deaf ears...

I actually just got a new big sponsor!! 🎉
I frankly hadn't expected that to happen right now, given the state of my online presence.

This is inspiring me to release MAJOR upgrades to HexstreamSoft Sponsors, earlier than originally planned!
For instance, individuals will have the option of adding their name at the bottom of all pages on the site, starting at 10$/month.
Meanwhile, companies and individuals will have the option of adding their name at the top of all pages, starting at 100$/month.
Needless to say, this completely BLOWS AWAY most offerings on the market!

This will of course use the existing "Monthly Perks Credits" system, so you will be able to leverage your existing investments any time you like.

Kind reminder, you are already eligible for Lifetime Perks!
Please let me know if you would like to activate this, as it is opt-in.
My new sponsor wisely did. :)

In other news, I finally bought a real flat bench (more like a training station, actually) and can already bench press 130 lbs, which is a good start.
My current barbell can support up to 250lbs, and I am aiming to reach that level one day.

Right now, I am putting the finishing touches on my rather advanced tmux config.
Unfortunately, the transition took MUCH longer than expected, mostly due to an important missing feature which has now been implemented, per my suggestion.

I am about to implement important CSS loading and HTTP caching optimizations globally on all my websites.
I also want to make it easy to install any of my websites for offline browsing in one click, thanks to Service Workers.
These, along with the HexstreamSoft Sponsors upgrade, will be crucial features for the launch of my CLHS replacement.

So! I think that about wraps it up. Check out my roadmap, and please feel free to contact me anytime!

Hello my longuest active sponsors ever!!

Since you recently completed a few notable milestones, I thought I would take the opportunity to
thank you from the bottom of my heart for heroically supporting me through a pretty tough time!

I note in particular that you have already been supporting me for more than a year,
and have now between you two contributed almost exactly 200$ CAD to my finances,
and are now my #3 and #4 biggest sponsors ever as of yesterday!

This is quite unexpected and very much appreciated!
Given the current state of my finances (I had around 10$ in my bank accounts a few weeks ago!),
even seemingly modest contributions have a surprisingly big impact!

Now, you might have noticed that the Common Lisp mafia scammed twitter into locking my account forever for no reason whatsoever.
They certainly have a knack for sabotaging important Common Lisp infrastructure for their sole benefit at the expense of everyone else!

Unfortunately, that has been quite a devastating blow to my life and operations, and I cannot meaningfully resume my Common Lisp activities at this time.
This indeed spells the end of "Hexstream 1.0", but fear not, as I have already begun planning and implementing "Hexstream 2.0"!!

This year I will be moving on to self-hosted Mastodon, which will PROFOUNDLY AND PERMANENTLY revolutionize ALL my operations,
in fact it will be much better than when I could use my twitter account (although I would very much like to regain access to it one day).
This will unlock a panoply of great benefits:

• I can create as many accounts as I wish for my various activities, which will give me and my followers unprecedented flexibility;

• I will completely own my own data and it will be virtually impossible to censor me at the source,
  or otherwise completely fuck up my operations for no reason whatsoever.

• The 500 characters max post length (compared to twitter's 280) will be one of many welcome improvements in usability.

• I will have full control to curate replies on my own server as needed to delete stupid scams and other undesirable content.

• My content will drive tons of traffic to MY website rather than twitter's. ;P

I am also looking to INTERNATIONALIZE most of my operations.
One of the best things I ever did was mobile-optimizing all my websites, and this is the next logical step.
I have always had strong innate abilities for learning languages,
as evidenced by achieving a pretty high level of French and English with relatively little effort,
and the time has come to lean into that ability much more.

I joined Duolingo on 27 august 2021, initially with the goal of learning Japanese.
After a few months of very intensive study, I realized that learning that language to a professional level would definitely take me years even in the best of cases,
so I instead switched to the easiest (and thus fastest) language I could possibly learn as a third language: Spanish.

I already completed more than half of the course in less than 3 months!
In fact, I was in the Top 0.1% of users on Duolingo in 2021, despite joining fairly late in the year.
As of today, I have a 166 days streak. Feel free to join me on this awesome language-learning platform!

Once I'm done with the Spanish course, I think I will already be at a "Limited Professional Proficiency" level,
and I expect I will be able to achieve a native-like level (at least in reading and writing) within a few years of using it as part of my operations.

Going from 2 mastered languages to 3 is actually a HUGE step strategically,
as for instance I could create a website for helping to learn between SIX (instead of two) pairs of languages:
French to English, English to French, French to Spanish, English to Spanish, Spanish to French, Spanish to English.
Of course, I still have an intense desire to learn Japanese eventually, and why not, even Chinese and others!
In fact, I want to become a hyperpolyglot! (6+ languages)

I will also consolidate the rest of my infrastructure on Cloudflare, once they finally release their awesome R2, a S3-like storage platform soon.
Together with the already available Cloudflare Workers,
I will finally have everything I need to finally get rid of my 5$/month DigitalOcean VPS and its various limitations and management burdens,
and I can finally re-introduce a build step to my web infrastructure to help me cope better until I can finally use my second web framework.

Last but not least, I am planning my big "return" (although I never left) to Common Lisp for 2023 with
THE RELEASE OF MY PUBLIC DOMAIN SPIRITUAL SUCCESSOR TO THE CLHS!!!

I did not want to do this without my second web framework,
but now I deem us to have ran out of time on this PATENTLY OBVIOUS BATSHIT INSANE EMERGENCY,
so I just have to do it, and the aforementioned build step should make things bearable, hopefully.

So, this update ended up being quite a bit longer than I had planned, I hope it inspires you!

I would love discussing with you guys if you like, so feel free to contact me and we can have a chat!