I was having a moment of weakness in my quest to permanently get off Facebook. The last two weeks I’ve missed some major things that was happening to some friends and family. Yes, I ultimately learned about it but I learned about it because my spouse is still on Facebook and he made a point of letting me know. At the same time I was still feeling constricted in my ability to discuss things with friends. I had been texting friends through various systems: LinkedIn, SMS, Matrix, iMessage, Twitter DMs, etc. and it occurred to me that all of this would have been in one singular place (Facebook Messenger) before now. So what was the point? Why not, I rationalized, rejoin and figure out how to leverage manual cross posting or some other mechanism to help extract friends from Facebook? Then it struck me, the next book up on my reading list was Steven Levy’s Facebook: The Inside Story. As I wrote on social media perhaps that book would push me one way or the other. Boy did it ever! The book is a great exploration of the entire history of Facebook right up to the present day. While I had mixed emotions earlier in the book as the story of Facebook went on so too did my revulsion to the idea of every going back.

I’ve spent today dusting off my old code Diaspora API driven blog comment system. The details of that implementation can be found in this blog post from late-2018. Now that it is running on a production server thanks to Diaspora-Fr I have revived the code running on the server and pointed it to their Diaspora server. I never coded up a full handshake for the initial authentication steps so that is all manual unfortunately, but I believe it is now up and running. The way I coded the server it can only point to one host at a time but since this is proof of concept right now that’s legit. For the time being I’ll be linking against that Diaspora server for comments on threads. You can comment from any Diaspora server though, not just that one. If you don’t have a Diaspora login then you can simply read the comments.

I’m becoming more and more energized by the climate debate every year. At the same time I don’t do anything practical about it at any point either. Do I reduce my consumption habits? No. Do I adjust my diet to make it more carbon friendly? As a side effect of eating more whole food plant based I do but it’s not the direct target. Do I do some kind of offsetting? No. So as much as I lament our global lack of action on climate change I fall into the same boat as everyone else. Just like everything in life I suppose I want it to be something automatic. I didn’t actively stop using CFCs to help fix the ozone layer but I did do it because the government banned CFCs. Hypothetically the same sorts of environmental policies could be underway for the past 20 years to help mitigate climate change. None of that has happened. So what can I do to do proactively address this problem? Actually the real question is what am I going to do to mitigate that? I’m going to take the same quantification and tracking approach that I use for everything else in my life.

I’m pretty stoked about what I was able to do in 2019 towards open source software. I’ve always contributed here and there but I took the momentum of contributions I did in the second half of 2018, in that case to the Diaspora project, and just kept on trucking. I spent a total of 653 hours on open source projects in 2019. A lot of that was new code generation but there is of course more to development than just writing code. There were lots of meeting times, some hackathons, documentation generation, tech support etc too. Some of these were projects I started as well as contributing to established projects. The five projects I contributed to the most fall into a relatively broad range of software (from highest to lowest number of hours contributed):

I started 2019 with my annual review of 2018, the second year in a row doing so. While I was down on myself for missing objectives before I did it upon reviewing the data I was pretty content. The same will not be said for my review of 2019, but let’s dissect that further with a health review of 2019.