What did 2025 do to my blog?

2024 was a good year (for the blog)

I’ve had this blog for a number of years, it has moved home a few times and my commitment to it has grown and shrank several times during that period. 2024 was a good year, but it wasn’t really a good year. It was (kind of) good for the blog as I was able to find time to regularly update the world with my latest inane ramblings. The reason I could make so many posts in 2024 is because I didn’t have much else to do.

Contracting dried up

I had been an IT contractor for a few years, working on some large projects over that period of time, but it all kind of dried up in 2023. I limped along with smaller contracts here and there but I had decided that it was time to return to permanent staff and so much of my focus was on getting a permanent job rather than chasing small contracts.

I approached my job search with the same focus I would give to a contracting role. I basically spent much of the Monday-to-Friday working hours looking for or applying to roles which left my evenings and weekends free. Weekends were (and are) usually taken up with family related activities, but evenings, without a commute, were usually time for me to work on side projects or work on a new blog post.

Blame the job

That all changed in late November, when I finally got a new permanent staff position. I had already prepared some content, mainly around the timesheet system I’d built, so I scheduled it and shifted focus to the new job.

What job?

Probably not the one I thought I was going for, if I am honest, but the one I have is quite interesting, at least I can say that today anyway. I thought I was joining as a SharePoint Developer but instead became more of a System Administrator for Oracle WebCenter Portals, a Fusion Middleware application. Unexpected, but interesting—at least for now.

Why are we blaming the job?

I have a hybrid-working role, which means I don’t need to be in the office everyday, however, on the days I do go to the office, I spend 2-3 hours in commuting time (total journey time, home-office-home). The commute is long, and by the time I get home, I’m pretty drained. It makes it harder to stay motivated for side projects. The last thing I want to do is go and take something apart and describe it, and invariably, the thing I am describing is a project I am or have been working on recently. Right now, I struggle to find the motivation to work on the project, let alone write about it.

What about the non-office days?

Good question, even though I did ask it myself. I have 2-3 days at home a week, I should be able to churn out those projects. I have been working on some YouTube content for future release that will talk through some of the challenges I have in the job. Not so much a ‘please help me’ cry for help, but I realised that the product(s) I am working on at the moment are still in use by lots of companies but finding answers to modern problems on aged applications isn’t always easy, therefore I decided to document my own journey with these applications. What strange problems I find and how I work through the problem and hopefully provide a solution at the end of the video, or a solution at the end of a sequence of videos.

On my remote working days, I do find time to experiment with lab environments, tackling problems with WebCenter Portals. I’m also working through Apex and SQL self-learning materials. The goal is to document these problems and solutions on YouTube.

The end of the blog?

No chance. I do like having this little mouthpiece, even if only a few people see it and I’d also like to think that some people find the content, or some of it at least, to be useful.

The blog isn’t going anywhere. Updates may slow down, but the ideas haven’t dried up — I just need to find the time.

Ideas?

I have a few ideas, I’ve always enjoyed building small tools to solve my own problems, and I think sharing them might help others too. As an example, my employer uses an internal tool to book desks and parking spaces, this tool is not available from outside of the company network. I found a couple of my earlier trips to the office (first few weeks) resulted in me being parked up near the office building, getting wifi so that I could find which parking space I had for the day. I built my own app that records that information for me, I’m planning a future post (or series) where I’ll break down how I built it using Flutter. I think some of you might find that interesting.

Stick with me

I will get the blog moving again, I just have an awful lot of things to fit in a limited number of hours at the moment and I am trying to figure out a method for making all of those things either fit, or play nicely together.

As I said I’m working on some YouTube content where I solve quirky technical problems in my new role. Once it’s ready, I’ll share it here — stay tuned!

Thanks for reading, thanks for sticking with me.