2020 for me has been a frustrating year. Frustrating not because of the pandemic (or at least not the pandemic in and of itself), but because of the way people in the U.S. largely handled it (i.e. selfishly and carelessly). 2020 has also been a frustrating year as I’ve observed millions people of fall for the charms of a narcissistic sociopath, effectively seeking to destroy themselves in the process. Those things have left a rather bitter taste in my mouth, one that I will never forget, but the silver lining in all of this is the fact that in my frustration I’ve found fire, motivation and a sense of urgency to pursue the interests and skills I need and want as I look forward to the future. As has always been the plan, OneOkami.com will be the showcase of those efforts, and it will bear more fruit in the coming months.
2020 has been a year of slow, quiet, and distracted adjustment. The U.S. presidential election season consumed a lot of my mental compute cycles as I watched in unforgettable alarm and horror at the reality of level of sincere ignorance, conscientious stupidity and utter corruption plaguing American society. But as I’ve already alluded to, I’m emerging from that cycle motivated through, if nothing else, a sense of urgency to strengthen of my focus and accelerate my activities concerning what I want to do and where I want to be so that I am able to achieve the spiritual, mental and physical freedom from the level of emotional affliction I endured this year.
In my previous blog on Hidden Developments back in September I shared that I was in the process of migrating Hobby Collection Django off its Heroku stack and onto my own AWS infrastructure, upgrading to the latest version of Django in the process. I’m pleased to share that as of today there is a functioning app actively running on my own AWS infrastructure, and while the frontend is still being ported over, all data has been migrated over. At this point, the native AWS version of the app is now the source of truth of my hobby collection and the present application hosted on Heroku has been sunset. I’ll leave it running until the native AWS implementation is ready to serve public traffic.
2020 being a year of distracted adjustment has meant either I've fallen off track in skill development or drifted away from passionate lifestyle interests. In pursuing a creative life after Adobe it has been my goal to ramp up in tools like Affinity Photo, Da Vinci Resolve and Capture One supporting my photography/videography. While I have indeed been using those tools, the depth of my knowledge of those tools remains shallow. This certainly hasn’t been helped my lack of photography and videography activities this past year (something I’m very aware of to my own self-frustration). Looking forward I am seizing the fire forged through frustration to hold myself accountable for this and have set goals for myself for the coming months. These include (but are not necessarily limited to):
Completing Hobby Collection Django’s migration to native AWS and decommissioning the Heroku stack
Building a REST API for Hobby Collection Django along with a SwiftUI client
Ramping up my skills with my photo/video editing tools
Getting my eyes back behind the glass with regards to my photography
While I’d been working primarily on Linux workstations (and continue to maintain Linux machines), I recently made the decision jump into the personally exciting future of high-performance ARM computing with an Apple Silicon-based Mac. I’ve long maintained a Macintosh workstation as a secondary machine so this space isn’t new to me, but as I embrace creative tools which simply aren’t available on Linux, high-performance and forward-looking ARM-based Macs are more practical for my day-to-day. It certainly helps that my iPad Pro (which has pretty much eliminated my desire for MacBooks at this point) has become undoubtedly the most used device my kit and I am excited for the prospective UX integration opportunities it offers by maintaining it as a primary device alongside my Mac. With that in mind and with regards to ramping up in video editing tools, I’ll be shifting my initial efforts to embrace Da Vinci Resolve over to Final Cut Pro. While my experience with Da Vinci Resolve is rather limited, I have successfully edited several videos with it and I can see how capable it can be as one ramps through its learning curve, especially with regards to color grading. It’s also a tremendous value given you can do so much with a free license. That being said, I’m fairly confident as the iPad Pro continues to shine, Apple will eventually offer a version of Final Cut Pro for the iPad Pro, especially given it’s now a native Apple Silicon application. The prospect of such workflows scaling across my desktop and mobile environments (as with several other existing use cases) is very exciting.
I’ve said before this site will grow, and I meant it. I continually prove that to myself by the simple fact I continually remind myself of its state with a level of dissatisfaction. It’s meaningful to me. And while 2020 has involved experiencing much of what I have no problem classifying as “evil”, I’m thankful it has served to propel me forwards from it. Let’s go.