I can't believe that I've not blogged since October last year. Well, actually, that's not totally true. I can believe it and there is very good reason for it. I've just not had much to blog about and I was feeling a bit lost in the developer community.
Maybe it was a sign of just doing too much. Working 9 til 5, organising 2 meetups, trying to maintain my Umbraco Package and migrate it to Umbraco 14 and also trying to have a life. I just had nothing to give and in the end, it meant I just didn't blog or do much else, other than work 9-5.
I'm still feeling a bit lost in the community but I'm taking steps to resolve this. The first was by deleting my X (twitter) account. Over the past few months I've just felt it was a chore to try and keep up with the developer community, specifically the Umbraco community. I had to check X, Mastodon, BlueSky, Discord, Facebook, Linkedin. It was just too much.
To combat this, I'm mostly just focusing on BlueSky and Mastodon and the Umbraco discord server. I can't check everywhere and I just need to hope that if someone finds a post by me interesting, they might share it on some of the other social channels or if someone says something good on a platform I'm not following, it will be shared somewhere I will see it.
I want to try and migrate my package over to U14 some time soon, but due hitting a bit of a brick wall with that, it's been pushed to the back of my todo list. I'll see if I can get it moved forward again. It would be good to get it on to U14. MediaColourFinder
I also want to submit a talk to Codegarden this year, I have the idea, I just need to flesh out the proposal!
With regards to other things in my life, well, obviously, I'm still working 5 days a week and I love my work. I just struggle sometimes with confidence but the Gibe team have been amazing and they have put in place a few things to help me with that!
The past year I have struggled with thoughts like, I'm in my 40s and people much younger than me are much better developers and I think to myself, why am I struggling? Will I ever be a "good" developer? Why can't I think of a developer talk for events? What is my specialty?
I don't have the answers but maybe by the end of the year, I might.
One thing I do hope to do is blog more about the things I am learning so that it might help someone else in a similar position.
So there you have it, my 2025 plans and I hope to find the balance between learning new stuff, blogging, getting back involved in the Umbraco Community more and enjoying my non-work related life.