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                  JOURNAL FOR WEDNESDAY 31ST DECEMBER, 2025
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SUBJECT: Another year of development
   DATE: Wed 31 Dec 11:35:45 GMT 2025

Another year of development as been and gone. To it I say good riddance! The
beginning of the year was a fight for survival. In January I was told I was
being made redundant with 3 months notice. From that point on I was spending
every waking moment job hunting, writing CVs and sending them into a silent
void. I didn’t get any responses, no rejections, no offers, no interviews…

It wouldn’t be until August, a full 6 months later, that things finally turned
around. By then I was at an all time low. I’d burned through my meagre savings
and things were getting desperate for myself and my family. With opportunity
came a cost. It would mean having to go contracting. Something I never, ever
wanted to be doing. I have anxiety issues and the thought of contracting and
not knowing where the next pay cheque would come from scares the crap out of
me. Like I said, desperate times.

For now, I’m happily working for Apple. The work is enjoyable and I’ve met
some great developers. Here is hoping this continues long into 2026!

As for WolfMUD, things have not been so great. I’ve not had a release since
August 2022 and no commits since April 2024. I have continued work on my own
programming language — Mere. It has seen 37 commits, but still no public
release yet. I did do the Advent Of Code again this year using Mere. That went
quite well and I only needed to make a few tweaks to Mere. However, it is
apparent that I need to revisit string manipulation as it is currently a
little clunky and slow.

The journal this year suffered abysmally. Only 20 posts compared to 26 last
year, which was pretty poor as well. The one article that people seemed to
like was the How-To: Build Kubernetes clusters[1].

So where do I go from here? I still want to use Mere for scripting in WolfMUD.
As for WolfMUD itself, I need to cast a critical eye over the code and assess
it. Over the last couple of years my coding has improved, new techniques have
been learned. In short, things have changed, I have changed. WolfMUD needs to
be dusted off and revived — again. I’m still toying with the idea of revamping
this website. I want to keep the look and feel but change the back-end to
Markdown instead of just plain text. This would give me a little more freedom
to be creative.

In the meantime, temperatures are heading towards -5°C outside, my heating has
been on the fritz for days and the whole family are freezing. *sigh*

Let’s all hope for a better 2026…

Happy new year everyone!

--
Diddymus

  [1] How-To: Build Kubernetes clusters ../11/16.html


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