Hello 2025

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 08:29:46 +1100

Oh, hi. It’s been a while. I have mostly forgotten about the existence of this blog, but I do regularly get GitHub notifications about vulnerable modules, so I’ve been thinking about updating the generator (Hugo) and the build process.

But anyway, a couple of years have swooshed by since my last post and a lot has happened.

In June 2023, we packed our things and moved from Sydney to Melbourne. The main reason was the high cost of living in Sydney. I still think it was a terrible mistake. Melbourne has never felt like home to me. The summer is short and winter temperatures can drop to 0ºC. Most of the year, it’s quite cold, and the weather is often depressing – not too different to Southeast England, to be fair. Sometimes it’s sunny, but usually a grey cloud cover is blocking the sun. There’s pretty much always a cold wind blowing from the southwest and it’s dusty.

If the wind blows from the inland in the summer, it can be scorching hot, up to 40ºC. The pollen season is particularly bad, and thunderstorm asthma is a thing here. It’s quite dangerous actually if you have asthma. Many suffer from it because Melbourne is the allergy and asthma capital of Australia.

There’s graffiti everywhere in the part of the city where we live. The public transport could be better, and sometimes, especially in the western and northern parts of the city, it feels like all development stopped in the 1980s. Sorry Melburnians, but Sydney does it better.

I still have the same job I had two years ago, but we are not fully remote anymore. I need to go to the office three days a week. The trend is moving towards 100% in the office, which is not great. Flexibility is usually only offered for those who live very far away from the office. I love working from home, but I also need the social aspect of the office and a great tech community it can offer.

We want to buy our own home, but due to the insanely high cost of properties everywhere in Australia, we are mostly priced out of the good locations. We need to make compromises and either buy a smaller place, or move further away. The latter is not ideal because a long commute sucks, and in the suburbia you cannot get anywhere without a car. We’ll see where we end up. Maybe in the next post you’ll get an update.

Our baby boy is not a little baby anymore (“No, I’m a little boy!”, he says). He’s now a toddler in the middle of the “Terrible Twos”, growing up fast, learning many new skills, and becoming quite a bossy character (“Daddy, come! Mummy, come! No, my do it!”). He constantly asks, “What’s this?” or “What’s that?” and we have to do our best to explain how everything works. Fascinating, but also so very tiring. I have no idea how single parents manage to get through all of this without losing their sanity.

I’m not even going to dive deeper into the political shit show happening in the world right now. You only need to open the news or social media feed and you get enough pain and misery from there.

Until the next post. Stay safe!

Thrash on Dawnstar

Hello 2025