At the end of the last round, my goal for the next one was to write more technical posts. And I think I accomplished that. I did #TheMonthProject and #AdventOfProgess which generated plenty of technical posts. Maybe not so detailed, but I don’t see myself as a blogger with the goal to write posts for everyone. It is just another hobby and personal documentation.

My new top post is the second post about paperless-ngx: Setup Paperless-NGX on Synology NAS: the CLI way, and the second top post is How. Time. Flies., with ¼ the views. 😅 It is nice to see that the paperless posts gain so much interest.

Overall, it was a good year. Work-related and personal. I had many projects, released a side project, and started some new ones. From a personal point of view, nothing major happened, just the normal struggles and lessons to learn. In and around the house, I also accomplished a lot. From my wife’s perspective, not enough, but this is expected. 😅

I think I will do a third round. Just to keep things rolling and to have something that forces me to put posts out there. But I will start the next round in March. Let’s see how the silly season will go, which is the time I put out the fewest posts. Workwise, I plan to have fewer projects in the summer so that I can focus more on my side projects. I need to build a side hustle someday so that I’m not so dependent anymore on my freelance projects.

What else can I say? Yesterday I started using openclaw.ai, and it consumed a lot of time, so I did not publish this post yesterday as planned.

To everyone who has read to the end of this post, stop consuming and start making things. I heard this phrase countless times in my past, and I totally regret that I wasted more than 10 years without creating something. Making kids and building the house do not count here; I haven’t done that alone. 😂

100 of #100DaysToOffload
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I was checking my general post count on write.as and saw that the overall count is not the same as I expected. I've clicked through the posts and located the issue. Editing all the post would make to much work, so I decided to write this post instead as a clarification.

The next post will be the last in this round of #100DaysToOffload.

🎉

99 of #100DaysToOffload
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Now as an adult, I’ve tried to overengineer the whole thing. My son just wanted to start, but I was not ready. I wanted to have a plan. A proper way to build this thing. I would rather not make a massive pile of snow and then dig into the snow. (I am a grown-up now; I can't lie on the ground and dig a hole into a pile of snow.) I wanted to build a good igloo. So I searched for ways to accomplish that. It took far too long. My oldest was bored and did other stuff meanwhile.

We lost some time, and it gets dark early in the winter. 😅 We created the first half of the igloo. From here on, my plan was not working out anymore. So I had a new thought. Why not create blocks of snow and do it the Minecraft way? (My son has been into Minecraft for some weeks now.) He approved it, and we started filling buckets with snow, compressed them, and placed them in a line.

Now the “blocks” are waiting to be assembled.

I wish I could be as carefree as a child again. Just do things without planning them to death. But then, you have moments where the “wisdom” of an adult has prevented the child from frustration. (Still, frustration is a good thing for learning.) It is really strange. Both worlds have their pros and cons. Somehow, we need to align to get the best of both.

97 of #100DaysToOffload
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I found this bit and wanted to share it.

»HTML’s Best Kept Secret — The Tag: Every developer knows . It’s the workhorse of the web. But ? Most have never touched it. Some don’t even know it exists. […]« — by @denodell

🧑‍💻 https://denodell.com/blog/html-best-kept-secret-output-tag

96 of #100DaysToOffload
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In my head, these 2 rules are making sense. The LLM has a smaller context to juggle with, and there is a better separation of concerns.

Meanwhile, I noticed that Claude has a new option after planning. Instead of just bypassing the permission to implement the feature, it also asks to clear the context and calls a new prompt with only the plan it created. This removes the need to create a plan file, like I always did before, and they are trying to reduce the need for the Ralph-Loop. Which I have not tried so far. This is also on my to-do list.

95 of #100DaysToOffload
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I’ve seen Eddy with All Shall Perish on November 25, and it was a great show. Now I have seen him again with Suicide Silence as the opener. They played 7 songs. 4 of them were old and good. The other 3 went by without any emotions. Overall, I had fun, and it was nice to see the “oldies” played live. :)

Dying Fetus played a solid set. Also 7 songs. All of them were a banger. The sound in this arena was incredible.

And then, the main act, Slaughter to Prevail. Oh boy. The sound was a disaster. The bass was too loud (not the bass player haha). The guitars were shouting over, and there was no way to understand Alex. It felt like listening to a newcomer band on their first-ever show. Or how we sound in our practice room. 😅 As a headliner and for +60 €, I expected much more. Last year we saw In Flames on the same stage, and it was remarkable. Such a good sound. But the sound of StP was destroying any fun on this show. Besides the sound, it looked like they delivered a good show. After around 6 songs, Alex had his no-microphone scream. Quite disappointing. It was rushed and not even close to the ones I saw on video. Kudos for trying; this is an incredible thing to do in an arena like this. But it should have been better executed. Like I said, it was rushed. No real announcement; it went silent really fast, then he screamed for 1-2 sec, and it was done. There was room for more. Build it up like in the videos; celebrate it.

Overall, it was a nice concert. And I know, if Slaughter to Prevail plays again, I will not seek to see them once more. If they are playing while I want to see another band, then I'm fine with it and check them out again. But I will not buy a ticket exclusively just to see them.

Once again, the Velodrom UFO is a great location. A lot of space, when well executed, a good sound. Plenty of toilets, good organization, etc. I always enjoy it there.

94 of #100DaysToOffload
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I have written a lot since then. Still, I can’t say whether this blog has helped me or not. On one side, yes, I never expressed so much of my life to the public. But have I learned along the way? I can’t really say. One thing is for sure: I have learned that I can write 200 posts without having a plan. My fear was that I'm unable to fill this blog with life and create 100 and then 200 posts that are mostly not complete nonsense. I definitely did not get better at writing. I still write what comes out of my brain with all kinds of typos, spelling mistakes, and grammatical errors. And that alone feels like work. I can’t imagine writing longer posts and refining them again and again. Writing in this blog is like cooking and woodworking; it makes a lot of fun, but only as long as I don’t have to make a living out of it. It makes fun but also stresses me a bit. Because, to please myself and get posts done, I have to force myself over and over again to do it. I did not build a habit in the past two years. I love it, but it also feels a bit like a burden. But I’m happy that I did it. (Funny how I drifted away from the initial question.)

So, what’s the other side? It helped me, but it also made a lot of work, which I had spent somewhere else. Or did it really?

I’m thinking about how I will continue after the 200th post. #100DaysToOffload needs to be completed until the end of January, and then what? Start it again? Write without the challenge? I doubt that I will ever publish a new post without a challenge. Maybe there is a 50-days-to-offload challenge? One with a smaller scope would be nice. One idea would be to write fewer posts but maaaaybeee longer. At least a bit more polished? And then put smaller thoughts and things directly out to Mastodon, for example. Or Bluesky. Does all this even have a future with AI? 😅

But writing on Mastodon or Bluesky stresses me out in some way. Not posting itself, but if someone replies and I have to answer. Over the last few years, I got so bad at replying; it is crazy. I have unanswered WhatsApp messages from 1-2 years ago… Do I really want to take this to the public? 😅 I had small conversations on Mastodon, where I really had to force myself to answer. Not writing the answer itself. To not forget to answer, if I don’t reply immediately, it is gone, and I will forget about it.

How to end this post? I have no idea. In the first place, I thought I would just write a small post, and then it escalated quickly. I don't know what to do with it. I can tell myself to revisit this post in the future, but this isn't going to happen. 😂

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Now with a much more profound understanding of AI and much, much better models, the changes I made here would have been done in minutes. I guess. 😅

The Resume-Project: https://github.com/danbruegge/resume

I have never written about it. This is one of my projects that had a low priority in the past and doesn’t get the love it deserves. But eventually, this is one that saves me a lot of work, and I need to adjust only a JSON entry after I’m done with a client.

Changes

Completed ✅

1. Outputs docx format, besides pdf.
   • I got the question from recruiters a lot if I could provide a docx file instead of a pdf.
   • After a lot of back and forth with some tools, I finally found a suitable solution.
2. PDF export is working again, now with Puppeteer.
   • wkhtmltopdf got deprecated.
   • It wasn’t installable via Homebrew anymore.
   • Now there is a modern solution where also the PDF looks better; wkhtmltopdf had problems rendering modern CSS.
3. Update to Next.js v15.5.
4. Update to Tailwind v4.

Planned 🏗️

• Design update.
• Update ESLint to v9.
• General update of all other applications.

Completing the HTML to DOCX conversion is a massive milestone for me. One that I thought would never be done. Because I did not see the use for it AND .docx is a shitty format. 🙃

I should invest more time in it. But if the clients provide long contracts, the need is not so high, so I constantly forget about it.

92 of #100DaysToOffload
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<!—more—>

Sure, why not? I love writing code. I really do. But I also love to create new software. I would miss writing code by hand and there will be time where I just do it, instead of letting AI do the job. Why not? If I work in my garage on wood projects, I use sometimes a hand saw (Japanese Saw) or a circular saw. Just use the right tool at the right time?

AI enables me to do things, that were too much work with not enough value. Now I can just add these small features to projects that were only on the nice-to-have-sometime-in-the-future list. It’s a win win for everyone.

Another thing where helps me, is getting startet with tasks. I often have a blocker in my head, where I feel lost and procrastinate until deadline is near. Here is just start talking with the AI about the topic and somehow I get motivated and start. Sounds crazy but it works wonders for me.

So, will AI replace my job? Yes, but I find another one, where I can utilize my tools to create and help!

91 of #100DaysToOffload
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There are posts I had prepared where I wanted to show how I migrated X to Y, for example. With AI in mind, this could now be done in minutes, and it no longer feels worth talking or writing about.

A lot of these posts can probably be deleted because they already feel outdated. It’s crazy how much has changed in such a short time, but it’s also exciting to see how all of this continues to evolve.

90 of #100DaysToOffload
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