known as @hacdias
✏️ These are my longer-form posts. Visit the archive for an yearly view.
Last month was Maintainer Month, a month were open source software maintainers are celebrated. A lot of the software in the world - and thus society itself - runs on open source software, which is something not known to a lot of people. During this past month, I read a few posts here and there about people sharing their journey and experience as an open source maintainer, and today I wanted to give my take on it.
May has now come to an end. We started seeing the first signs of summer, warmth and, at the same time, some rain, to keep us refreshed. It was an unusually calm month in my life, I would say. However, I have the feeling that it is the calm before the storm.
Last September, I decided to finally give my shot at LLMs for code development. At that point, I had barely used any of the most known LLMs for a serious reason. It’s not nine months later, and a lot has changed. With all of the news about Claude 4 and considering I have a work ChatGPT subscription, I decided to give LLMs another try.
April was a fantastic month. Spring is now on full swing, the trees and flowers are in full blossom, and the weather is warming up - perhaps a bit too much. It was also a month of travel, my second intercontinental trip ever. Let’s take a look!
March has ended a few days ago, meaning that this recap is coming a bit later than usual. Maybe it is a product of the weather being nicer, and the fact that I’ve been a bit more busy than usual. It’s been quite some hectic days!
A few days ago, I competed the Couch to 5K program, which is a running program designed to slowly build one’s up to run 30 minutes, or 5 kilometers. Depends a bit on whether you follow the timed or the metric program. I decided to start it back in January, and now, two months later, I’m glad to say I completed it!
February is now past us, so it’s time for me to quickly recap what has happened last month, this time a few days later than usual. I was hoping to have posted more during last month. However, I made a few updates to the website with the intention of making that easier!
January is coming to an end, meaning that around 8% of 2025 has already passed. It felt like a slower month, definitely slower than the previous months in the sense that there was nothing big happening. However, the things that happened, I’m very glad with.
A few months ago, I hinted at the fact that I wanted to try out going for a run. And even though I didn’t share more about it, I did it. Back in September, I decided to try going for an interval running session. However, I had absolutely no running equipment at the time, so I just put on some gym clothes and my sneakers, and went.
Similarly to previous years, it’s time to share my musical habits throughout 2024. Around a month ago, I published my Spotify Wrapped 🎁, but, as usual, I don’t trust it completely. If they’re sharing it before the end of the year, how can it successfully show the statistics for the whole year? Here I am again, with my (almost) complete data from Last.fm.
Now that the last year has ended, I can finally collect all the data from the different services, and start my yearly analysis. This year, we’re starting with the “Year in Popcorn”. In contrary to last year, I brought back the plots by reusing both the data from my website for the movies, and the data from Trakt for the series.
December is coming to an end, and with it so is 2024. It was a year full of change, challenges and adventures. I managed to tick off quite a few items from my impossible list, achieve fluency in Dutch, and start a new job. All of this things, combined, made it a positively challenging year.
December is now coming to an end. It’s time to recap about what has happened during this last month, before writing my final Year in Review. This month was quite of a rollercoaster, I visited a few places, met with people a few times and watched a lot of stuff.
Just like last year, a lot of “App Defaults” posts have started popping up in my RSS feed. So, I decided to join with an updated list, featuring more categories than last year:
In the course of 2025, I hope to further reduce the Google services from this list, especially when it comes to documents and cloud file storage. To be fair, I don’t really use it that much, only for maintaining one or two spreadsheets, and I rarely make slides or written documents. Moving these to local files would be ideal, but it is also undeniable that the versatility of Google Docs makes it very compelling to use.
Keep an eye on my uses for an always up to date version of this list!
A friend of mine just sent the link to this AI-powered accent guesser from Bold Voice. After trying it out for a few times, it guessed me as either Romanian or Bulgarian, but always with a low confidence. However, a few friends of mine from certain countries got more than 95% confidence on their country, even when trying to fake an accent from somewhere else.
