I was always interested in the Year in Review posts from people. It looks like it is something that you can’t create after the fact. You need to keep some notes, and perhaps log data about the things you did. Some people keep count of the number of emails sent and received or kilometers traveled. After the fact, these kinds of details are rather hard to come by.

To make this a great post, I will have to dig into the notes I made, the data that I collected, and the posts I wrote on the other blog and combine these into witty graphs and paragraphs of enjoyable words.

You are reading the first Year in Review post I ever wrote on this blog.

Lead developer

This year I got a promotion to Lead Developer. I’m very happy with the opportunity I got this year and let’s what we get to do next year.

Route 66

This year my wife and I traveled to the United States. We drove 2869 miles from Chicago to Los Angeles along the historic Route 66. We saw some things of the United States. Not much when you think about it. Just nine states.

Quantified Self

When we returned from the United States, I found that the Fitbit had charged while we were gone. This Fitbit had stopped charging some time ago. I had found out that the problem was with the charger and not with the watch itself. I was even more surprised that the problem was not with the small connector for the Fitbit, but with the USB-A connector on the other end.

This started my exploration of possible Quantified Self tracking that I could do. I started using Exist, with Fitbit, Last.fm and RescueTime.

A few months ago Exist added the ability to track coffees, alcoholic_drinks and keystrokes. The problem is that these attributes there are no programs that track these values. To remedy this I created a new program that sends these values to Exist. The first version just sends these values. A later version will send these values automatically every day.

I already created a small widget on my phone home screen with Tasker and LWGT, that counts the cups of coffee that I drank in a day. At night this will get send to Exist. This doesn’t work from beginning to end, but as they say manual until it hurts.

This whole Quantified Self thing will help me make next years review a lot more numerical.

Indieweb

This year I haven’t developed much for the Indieweb. I made some improvements to the blog. I added destination support. At some point it was possible to send something to my blog and then let Node-Red handle the post. It could then send to post to the blog.

I added support for Join. It’s a way to send stuff to your phone, or other supported devices. It’s written by the developer of Tasker.

I did experiment a bit with Server-Sent Events in Ekster. The reader part now supports small posts in the right sidebar. These get sent by the Micropub server when new posts arrive in realtime. It’s even faster this way, compared to updating every minutes. But for the most part I only did cleanup of the code.

Home Automation

This year I started automating some parts of my home. This started with the Smart Meter that was installed in the beginning of the year. Around the same time I found the IKEA smart lights. Which led me to Home Assistant and Node-Red.

The automation I’m the most proud of is the I get a notification when the washing machine is done cleaning. This is build with a Wifi socket with energy measurement built-in, ESPHome and Home Assistant.

The sockets themselves are flashed with a firmware created with ESPHome. These sockets send the power measurements with Wifi to Home Assistant. When the measurements reach a certain level of power it changes a state in Home Assitant from Idle to Running. When the power level drops again, the state is changed from Running to Clean and a notification is sent to my phone.

Conclusion

It always hard to know what the new year will bring. We do already a expect a little miracle in april. So I guess that will take most of my time next year.