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
#log
Thoughts? Discuss...

I left 2025 satisfied and happy among my loved ones. We gathered at my home with some friends and their kids. It was a nice evening. While waking up, I started to write these words. I initially planned to write them before leaving 2025. But this time I will publish my review. For 2024, I’ve started the post but never finished it.

While reading the never-published post of 2024, I realized that 2025 was good and not as bumpy of a ride as 2024. 2024 had many ups and downs. And I can say personally and as a family, we settled somehow.

2025 started with finishing #100DaysToOffload at the end of January. Finishing the challenge made me proud. Because I never really finished something similar on the web. All I started was abandoned after some time.

Most of the spring and summer were not present for me, writing-wise. I had numerous freelance projects and focused a lot on family and non-IT-related stuff at home. In consequence, I did not write a lot. I’ve started the #TheMonthProject to push me to get my #pelletyze app done. I had a lot of fun writing these posts. But because of spring and summer, I released it quite late in October 2025. But this was marked as a giant achievement for me. I worked a lot on #pelletyze and I’m happy that it is now in a presentable state. :) Since the release, I did some small updates but never did marketing for the site to reach a user base. Because I still have some features and small improvements I want to implement before bringing it to a wider audience.

In spring, I tried Cursor and made a subscription. I wanted to see what AI hype is all about and how it works out. For a year I was already a Copilot/Supermaven user and had a small glimpse of what AI can do. For me it was quite a learning curve, because I needed to find my flow. After I found it, I tried Claude Code and never looked back. 😅 I still have a Cursor subscription because I’ve subscribed for a year, like I did with Copilot and Supermaven. Which was not a mistake, but in a year a lot can happen. Especially in the tech and AI space. So for the future, I know that I just try things out on a monthly basis. My most used AI tools now are ChatGPT and Claude Code. Maybe I should also write about my usage of them in another post. To end the paragraph, I can say that in 2025 AI had a massive impact on how I work now, and it improved a lot for me.

In the summer I made an old friend after over 10 years. We split in a not-so-friendly way and never talked it out, so I never knew in which state we were. But I tried to take all the courage and wrote him a message with what I feel about us. The good thing is no one was mad, and we’ve met and talked for some hours. :)

Over the summer, we made a hard decision. Our oldest was on the path to start school. But we decided to let him go to the kindergarten for one more year. He is now with his brother in a new kindergarten. The hardest part is not the new location or that he is not in school; for him, the hardest thing was leaving his friends. Which is something we had in mind but never thought that it would have such an impact on a little boy. Socially it is hard for him. But we hope that eventually, it is better for him. Since he got six on his school enrollment. He was not thoroughly ready for it. In 2026, we then have his school enrollment, and I hope that it improves everything for him, because he can then see his old friends again daily.

In December, I started my #AdventOfProgress event. Last year I did #AdventOfCode and #AdventOfTypescript and while it was fun, it cost me a lot of time I could have spent on something better. And this year, I wanted to spend the time on something with a real outcome. So I developed a React Native app in December. It was a lot of fun, and I had a prototype, which was planned to be done in the spring of 2025. 😅 But this is not relevant. I completed something again in 2025, and this is important. I now need to tweak some things and complete the landing page so I have a releasable app. The prototype is installed on iOS and Android on the phones of some friends, and this is a wonderful feeling. They can provide feedback, and I have a small audience right from the start. :)

Over the December break, I also finished most of our basement, especially the playroom for the kids. I’ve added a swing, a therapy swing. We know this type of swing from the occupational therapy for the little one. The boys and all the other kids who visited us over the last few days had a lot of fun with it. I also added wall bars so the kids can climb and “hang” around. Finishing this project gave me a gigantic relief and gave me a feeling of being free. Sounds strange, but this project was now in the works for some years. Which was not my fault. Mostly. Progress here had depended on some external people.

So the 24.12. marked a point where I could check some points on my to-do list as done. So I could start some new things, which were waiting for some time now. In this case, start setting up a home lab. I used an old notebook to install Proxmox, Forgejo, and Vaultwarden. I can now self-host my Git projects in my local environment and access them via VPN from the outside. Setting up Proxmox with a good backup strategy gives me a foundation I can build upon in the future. I plan to extend this all with Home Assistant and other tools that will improve my life. :)

All this sums up 2025 quite well. It was a good year. And I look forward to what 2026 will give me and my family. 😎

83 of #100DaysToOffload
#log #lastyear #review #2025
Thoughts? Discuss...

So I got a “brilliant” idea. #AdventOfProgress – I like to combine both to take advantage of this time and make some progress. I would say this is an evolution of #TheMonthProject moved into December.

There is an app idea that has been living in my head for some time now, and I want to get it out with some tools I haven’t worked with in a long time. It has already been more than 10 years since I started a small project with React Native. And with the rise of expo.dev, I see a good opportunity to try it out in December. The plan is to have an MVP (minimal viable product) by the end of December or, better yet, by Christmas. It should be possible in this span of time. But I also see my calendar and the entries there, with stuff that also needs to be done. Let’s see if I will manage this. :)

I hope I can post the progress daily.

58 of #100DaysToOffload
#log #TheMonthProject #AdventOfProgress
Thoughts? Discuss...

So what happened? As I've already written, I got a call from an old project which required help, and I started to jump in last week. My day is mostly packed with the work for my clients, the work in the basement and spending the rest time with the family. And when there is some spare time, I'll have a break and watch a Series or play a small game. For example, Silo on TV+ or A game about digging a hole on my steamdeck.

But I've learned something from doing #TheMonthProject. I will continue to write on my progress of the side-projects. This made fun, despite it is more effort. :)

On the weekend, I've tested Cursor on a small side-project and it was interesting. With 2 prompts, I was able to create a new feature in minutes, which would have taken maybe some hours. The result was working, but far from perfect. Plenty of errors and warnings. Still, the app was working as it should. Then I've started to ask if Cursor can optimize the code. It produced a lot of new code, rewrote types which were already imported, and in general made a lot of chaos. :D In conclusion, it made fun to explore what is possible, but for now, I don't see me using it on a professional basis. But I will continue using Cursor on this little project. In the end, I think it is only a matter of how one is writing the prompts. It's like a child, where you have to be as wordy as possible and set clear boundaries.

So, the February was busy without progress. But only on my side-projects. I made progress on my client projects. I made progress on my fitness level by working out continuously (It's nice to have a better form on the sets each week). I made progress by completing a book and started a new one. I made progress by completing 3 audiobooks. I made progress in our basement.

It looks like the February wasn't that bad regarding progress. :D

09 of #100DaysToOffload
#log
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Here, on the left is the bug and on the right the fixed version.

Sadly, I don't have time for more at the moment. But I think it is better than nothing.

07 of #100DaysToOffload
#TheMonthProject #pelletyze
Thoughts? Discuss...

Besides spending some quality time, I've had a lot to do in one of my projects. Where most of the work is now done for the big release. Now I can slow down a bit here and can concentrate on other things. Funny coincidence, I've got a call from one of my old projects, that they require help. Because I have so much time to spare, I said yes. (This was a joke, I never have time to spare.) 😎 There is always something to do, but I like to help and to build a better reputation.

After this call, we've decided that I need to outsource some work in our garden. Mostly removing old plants and roots, dinging a pit for our pool in summer and some other small stuff, which takes a lot of time. I like this work because you don't have to think a lot here. Just do the work. Some kind of meditation. But I know that I don't have this time until the springs comes. So I have to admit that we need help here. Besides my projects, we also have the basement, which needs to get done. My wife decided that it should be done until her birthday in April. The help with the garden is now a good compromise. And I'm happy with this solution. 😀

That's it for today. Just some random things that came to my mind about what's going on in my life right now.

06 of #100DaysToOffload
#log
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So, I just did some small clean up tasks. Updating the CHANGELOG.md, and tagging the current commit with the version number v0.5.0-alpine-shepherd-boy. Because I'm a massive fan of the series Better Call Saul, my version names will have the names of episodes from BCS.

And that's it for #TheMonthProject update #3. Furthermore, this is post 5 in the #100DaysToOffload challenge. The pressure to complete round 1 did something to me. I already have 5 posts within the first week. Which makes me happy. Seems like I'm now in some flow of writing blog posts. 🥳

05 of #100DaysToOffload
#TheMonthProject #pelletyze
Thoughts? Discuss...

Today, I've implemented a “delete all” button. To have the opportunity to just delete all entries. This is just a convenient feature so that I don't have to do it directly in Supabase. I don't know if a real user would need this, but it was easy to implement and saves me some steps. Most of the delete logic is already implemented, I just needed to generalize the button and the action. Doing Server Actions in Next.js is straightforward to implement.

The most time was used on the question, where I should put this button. While on it, I also fixed some minor style issues for desktop and mobile.

That's it for today's #TheMonthProject effort. Going +50 min on this simple topic feels a bit long. But anyway, progress is still progress. 👋

04 of #100DaysToOffload
#TheMonthProject #pelletyze
Thoughts? Discuss...

For some time, I'm working on a pellet analyze site. I collect the data, when and how many pellet bags I refill in our tank. Which will give me then an overview of how many pellets we used in the past. With this data, I can see at which time we turned on the heating in the house or have a before and after view after we did the house insulation. It's not much and I keep adding some smaller features. Currently, it will give me a number, on which I can roughly estimate how we need for the year. Because the storage is nearly empty, and I need to get more.

For the app, I've created a small script which will fetch the current price of 1t of pellets. It is running inside a cron job. And by occasionally checking the app, I can see when the price is good and should order new pellets.

Lately, I've found a bug, where the fetched price is not the same as I can see on the page of the supplier. So I've done some investigation and found out, that I missed a combination of query parameters. While I was on it, I removed some I didn't need anymore. I'm happy that the page of the supplier is stable without changing the API a lot.

That's it for today. This was my contribution to #TheMonthProject. I've done a minimal introduction of my pellet analyze side-project and fixed a long-overdue bug. 😃

02 of #100DaysToOffload
#TheMonthProject #pelletyze
Thoughts? Discuss...

After a long time and no real usage of my paperless-ngx instance, I plan to get back to it. Get it working again, add all the missing documents and secure it enough, so that an update want to destroy everything once more. The instance is up and running, but after I've lost all my documents 2 times after an update, I lost motivation to get back and add everything one more time. Let's see how this will work.

I've already bought tickets for 2 concerts in February. So expect more concert posts. 🤘

Another thing I will do is my #TheMonthProject. I've planned it to do it mostly in January, but after I've got sick twice in this Month, I needed to step back a bit and postpone this. But now, February is starting, and I'm feeling fit, I will tackle this. Initially, I've had in mind to make some progress on smaller projects to get them off my plate, but that was for January. For Q1, I set the goal to mostly finish and release my wood pellets project. So in February, my focus will be on this project. And I will document most of the steps. First I thought, to document as much as possible, but my time is limited, and I will invest as much of it in finishing my project. Because I already have Ideas for new ones. With this post, I will start my #TheMonthProject today.

So, what else can I talk about? My current mood is fantastic, and I am happy with everything around me. Which is usually a sign that something will happen and pulls my mood back to an okish level. I'm curious what it will be.

Let's end this post. Every one who reads this, have a nice Saturday. 👋

01 of #100DaysToOffload
#log #TheMonthProject
Thoughts? Discuss...