New Year 2021!

It’s the beginning of a new year, after a particularly crappy one for most people. For me, it wasn’t so bad, just stressful. I moved to Los Angeles late in 2019 to be with my now wife. Found a decent place to live that allows the animals we own.

I tried to refrain from writing about the whole goings on with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. That wasn’t the easiest thing to do, considering how prevalent and all-encompassing the coverage has been. Kind of like not mentioning Trump for a whole day over the last four years.

I did put out a few quick articles on how to set up a remote worker situation with OpenVPN that’s included on some home routers. I may refine that later as I think this situation is going to go on a long time, and most people with office jobs may actually prefer it.

Just finished my end of the year cleaning, which I try to do at the end of every year instead of the traditional spring cleaning. I find it’s a better time as the holidays are more clustered and allow for the free time I need to do so.

As for my resolutions, I have a few. One is to write at least two posts a week for the entire year. One post per month over on the WorkEndTech blog if I run across something to write about.

Some of my personal projects I’ve resolved to actually finish this year are:

• Password Generator for WorkEndTech. Basically a password generator for adults and professionals that uses combinations of real words to make the password. You’d get something like EggsOaks47 or Tr@c3R!bsA93 instead of the impossible to remember and, honestly no more secure random strings most generators use. Already have a working app, just need to figure out how to integrate it with WordPress
• Dice Roller for table top RPGs. I know there’s a bajillion of these out there already. I’m looking to design one that more than one person can use and everyone can see the results. I think it’d be good for roll tracking and a way to augment Zoom game sessions. I know sites like Roll20 do all of this already, but I’m not a fan and it has too much extra crap to deal with when you sign in for a game.
• Basic IP Tools for IT work. I’ve got a few things like this already I’ve come up with over the years, just want to make them public. Nothing fancy, just ping tools, dns record grabber, and an email address validation tool. Basically just some stuff I’ve written code for over the years for other projects but could be useful on their own.

I’m not looking to profit off of any of them, and the dice roller might be made open source since it’ll be primarily JavaScript anyway. If I can get them up on a site somewhere, I might put ads on them to try and pay for the hosting.

I decided on these three projects as I think they’ll enhance my skills with web based application development. So far I’ve learned how to basically create an API for an application. I’ve also learned how to work with CodeIgniter. I was going to go with another framework, but CodeIgniter seems to be the smallest, has the fewest number of files, and doesn’t require me to learn an entirely new way to code PHP. Some of the other frameworks I looked at should almost be a new language in and of themselves.

Well, that’s my first post of the year, here’s to another hundred and three this year!