My last status update was on November 11 2016, so it's high time for a new one!

You cannot tell it from my activity here, but I have been posting about myself online. Over on my Known site I have posted status updates and have been keeping track of interesting stuff I found online using the bookmarks feature. Some things I also cross-post to Mastodon. I do post the occasional personal note, but haven't done any actual "writing". I'm certainly not a prolific writer. I am doing this now as a self-reflection and to see if this site's set up still works.

Since a couple of weeks I have also been done a digital housekeeping; I have installed Fedora Linux as my primary OS on my private PC as well. I am keeping the Windows 10 install for the occasional need to jump back for some CD burning or other thing that unfortunately still works better on Windows. (fair enough - WHO still burns CDs nowadays anyway?)

Writing this using Vim on the Linux Terminal. It's been enlightening to have again full control over my digital experience. Was feeling too much blocked into by Microsoft lately. Gnome 4 is cool and I have even made my first ever "shell extension" applet. A simple clock based upon the Seasonal Clock project - just showing an emojie for the current UTC time - but it feels very cool to have been to add something I like myself in a not so complex way.

I no longer carry the Twitter handle "johanbove" - I deleted my account there as I totally do not agree with what Musk is trying to achieve with that platform. I also quit Keybase.io as that project is dead too. I do PGP the classic way again - not that many people actually use that - not even for signing e-mails. I feel that the government could do some more work on this - perhaps through the Digital Ausweis - of which I obtained the European Edition of. So I am active on Mastodon and passively on LinkedIn.

Privately we are doing good. N. is growing up strong and happy. I try to be the best daddy I can think of being. We have been travelling to Italy at least once every year, which makes my parents in law very happy. They do come over to Düsseldorf for a couple of weeks still too from time to time - this helps a lot and it is a great way for N. to get to know his family - who unfortunately all live far away. We're getting ready for school next year. In some weeks we'll do the required school info evenings and will try to get him registered in our favorite school. We live in D. Stadtmitte so luckily there are some choices.

Work is well - still at Deloitte Digital - seven years are coming up! Since Covid lock-downs I am working mostly from home office, and so are most of my colleagues. Challenges have come up and have been faced, which is to be expected. Cannot write much about what we actually work on - for the sake of keeping this blog personal; but I can say that I have been working mostly with Angular in the last months. Funny how that framework is still very much alive in enterprise World. I would like to work more with Svelte too - perhaps in the next one. I do enjoy Angular - it's so extensive and powerful - and I still learn on the job! That's one of the motivations I enjoy.

So it's getting close to midnight or "Mountain" hour as it is here in Germany - so I am going to call this post done. See you hopefully soon again!

Johan.