Issue #4: Sorry it's been a while!

Well, I've not done well have I? - I only managed to get 3 issues of my newsletter published before I went and disappeared off the face of the planet for 21 months 😭.

In the off-chance this has made it past your spam folder, let me firstly apologise for being incredibly flaky, and secondly, given my flakiness, I think it's best to change this from a monthly newsletter to a not-more-than-once-a-month-but-quite-possibly-less newsletter. Hopefully you're still happy to be subscribed to my newsletter and receive my rambling now and again.

A lot has been going on over these last 2 years and it turns out that trying to keep on top of home life, work life (including 2 job changes) & indie-hacking hacking on the side is a bit more than I could handle.  Recognising my signs of burnout, something had to give and my side projects, whilst I enjoy them, are the lowest priority of the 3.

More recently I've started to get a bit of motivation back and I've started to work on a few little bits and pieces of my side projects again - including getting this newsletter up and running again (I've only just ported it over from Revue by Twitter which shut down in January 2023). Hopefully, this will mean I have something to put in the next few editions 🤞.

Looking Forward

I intend to do small incremental updates and releases regularly, even if the update isn’t quite “finished” yet (when is it ever?), and I'm starting (more or less) with this newsletter.  I've wanted to write this edition for a few months now, however, there has always been something that’s pushed it further and further down the line.  I needed to move from Revue to a new newsletter platform (in this case Beehiiv) but then it stalled because

• I wanted to get the Beehiiv branding/template all nicely set up and

• I wanted to include a Beehiiv subscribe button on my reachable.link profile and

• I wanted to make use of redr.it (another of my projects) so potential affiliate links are working through that and

• I wanted to document the process of setting up an affiliate use-case for redr.it so I could prompt it to an affiliate audience and

• I wanted to ....

I fell into the trap that so many fall into (as I have previously as well) of trying to get everything "perfect" but as is always the case - there is always something else to do before it's "done".  At this point, I've not actually got a whole lot checked off that list but that "Write newsletter issue #4" item on my list has been hanging around for far too long, so, I've opted to bring it front and centre, get this edition out before I find another reason to put it off and iteratively handle those enhancements as I go.

But to have content to fill those future editions I'll have to mix those updates and enhancements above with actually doing some development on my side projects otherwise, it'll be pretty dull.  So, next on the list is taking stock of what projects I've got in progress, in the backlog, rumbling around inside my head, what I want to work on and what I can realistically progress (this might not be the same thing).

I’ll try and summarise the outcome in my next edition.

Recent Highlights

Password Angel - Donations & Loyal Users

I've had a couple of pleasant surprises recently. The first is a couple of donations (via Buy Me a Coffee) to support Password Angel, the most recent of which, by Ally Burns, covers the current running costs for Password Angel for the next 12 months.

The 2nd is that Password Angel now appears to have a small but loyal user base who are now searching for and accessing the service directly via the product name.

IdleMoments PHP 8.3 docker images

In my effort to standardise my side projects, I also need to bring them up to date. Currently, my projects are running a mix of PHP versions between 7.4 and 8.2 and until recently I did not have a PHP 8.3 image to allow me to upgrade them to the most recent version.

I saw this as a prerequisite to bringing all my projects up to date so I spent a bit of time and reworked the GitHub actions responsible for building and pushing my docker images to Docker Hub. The actions now better use the matrix options to create multiple images for different versions, engines and environments.

Now I have a PHP 8.3 version available I can bring all my projects up-to-date and use all the new features.

Recent Blog Posts

What I've been reading

Thanks

Congratulations! You’ve made it this far so hopefully I’m doing something right.  If you have any comments, questions, feedback, ideas, suggestions or just want to say "Hi 👋"  I would love to hear from you.

You can reach me via Twitter, LinkedIn or by replying to this newsletter.