What’s happening with me now? Last updated on 2025-08-17
Cycling
My plan in early 2025 is to take the bike up the Rhine from Cologne to The Hague, Holland where it ends in the North Sea.
This is roughly 360 Km, I plan to make one way of the trip in three days.
Once there, I have the option to either bike back home or take a train.
Then, later in the year, I plan to go the opposite direction and follow the Rhine down all the way to where the two Rhine rivers merge in Tamins, Switzerland.
This is roughly 770 Km and the terrain is rougher than going to mostly flat Holland.
I’m planning to do it in a week, again with the option to take a train back home if need be.
Sadly, none of these plans came to pass. At the end of my training for the first tour, I re-injured my right knee. I’ve fought with knee problems since I was 16 years old, so this isn’t new for me. While I’m not in pain, the knee can’t support multi day tours as I was planning originally.
I’ll spend the next months recovering and assessing how realistic such a tour is to attempt next year. I’m pretty hung up on this at the moment. Can’t wait to get back into the saddle.
Software Engineering
I finally sat down and really got into Rust. I’ve had a strong interest in systems programming for a while and this year I worked through Rust in Action. While I’m not an expert by a long shot, I am sufficiently hooked that I bought multiple ESP-32 microcontrollers for upcoming hardware projects. I also have The Raspberry Pi Book to help me get started with electronics.
For my day job, I’m reading Writing Data-Intensive Applications in the hopes of discovering and then filling the holes in my distributed system’s knowledge. I have opted for a more general book to cover more ground, with the option to dive deeper into specific topics as needed.
Work
At my current employer, I feel I have reached the end of where I can develop as purely a software engineer. My plan is to get into a position where I get to spend more time helping colleagues out with their training and career goals.
I want to give more talks and foster a stronger environment of learning within the company. More knowledge sharing and more experimenting on the job to get people excited about work, less focus on just delivering on deadlines.
Goals
For this year, I made the following New Year’s resolutions:
- Write an article every month.
- Play an Indie game every month.
- Read a book every month.
So far, I’m having success in pursuing these goals, but I’m not sure how much I believe in the positive effect. I’m usually quite late on writing an article, at times back-dating them when they’re only finished a few days into the next month. And while I did read a book per month, I didn’t really cultivate a continuous reading habit. I usually pick it back up towards the end of the month, sometimes picking books by their page count so I can still fit them into my arbitrary deadline.
The only goal that is working out great so far is playing more videogames. Because I know that I won’t be able to dedicate much time to them, I pick shorter experiences and I put more care into my selection. I’ve played some great games this way, many of which were sitting in my library for years already.