What’s in store for 2020?

The big question every year, what will I be doing this year? Are there spillovers from last year? Can I start with new projects? The idea is to dive into some of these ideas I have for 2020.

Walking through Basel

Last year I had the idea to walk through every street in Basel within a year, I didn’t quite finish that, in fact, I’m not even halfway there. But mid-year I realized that I won’t be able to finish. It didn’t bother me, the plan is still active but not tied to a timeframe, I will just continue until I’m finished.

Movie Projects

In my 2019 recap, I listed 3 movie projects I finished in 2019 and that I plan on increasing that number. So the idea is to create at least 4 fully finished projects. I have some ideas about what kind of projects to make, but there the main goal is to just finally do it and stop thinking or talking about it.

SoaPatrickSeven

In the last four years I released a new theme every year (2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019), it’s never the plan but I end up doing it anyway. Five to Six was a rather small incremental step and I don’t know if I have the time and energy to create a completely new design, especially since for the first time in a long time I really like the design I’m using and let’s face it, SoaPatrickSix sounds and looks better than SoaPatrickSeven.

There are a few ideas in my head though:

Recreate the theme from scratch and use a much more stable markup and styling, get rid of unused elements and just refactor a lot of stuff. I’ve learned a lot in the last year which I’d like to include.
Using vue.js and Rest API for a new theme (that’s quite a big undertaking though with a big learning curve).
Better SEO for people actually finding this place and the excellent content that I’m writing.

Blog Posts

Just like with movie projects, I plan on increasing last year’s amount of blog posts (48) for this year which should be doable, actually, 48 is a laughable low number. Writing daily is nonsense, but if there’s something to tell I will tell it and I doubt it will be daily, need to do other stuff as well.

What I want to try is to be a bit more elaborate in my blog posts. In the past, I wrote about stuff I did, and especially in the coding department I never really shown what I did. So just like with the bitbucket pipeline code, I plan on showing (off) any code I wrote, maybe there’s someone out there who’s looking exactly for what I did, or I will look back at ugly code fragments years down the road.

General

I want to find my own voice and for that, I have to start thinking outside the box, do crazy stuff and push my own creative boundaries a bit and see where it leads me. This is true for Movie Projects, taking Fotos for my own collection or Instagram, designing Websites and also writing blog posts.

I mean this place is exactly designed for that, try stuff out, don’t be afraid to make wrong decisions and don’t be discouraged if nothing good comes out of it, just keep on trying. I think that is my motto for 2019. So let’s try to live by it!

Factory Feed

The rest can be seen in the Factory.

Some thoughts on 2019

January 6, 2020
List, Movie, Music, TV Show

I don’t want to make some top 10 lists about stuff I liked and didn’t like the past year as I did for 2017 (Best Movies, Worst Movies, Best TV Shows). Or just look ahead like I did last year. No, this year I thought I just mention things that I liked, things that I didn’t like and also some stuff that I did that’s worth mentioning. Everything sorted alphabetically.

Things I liked.

Avengers: Endgame, a movie Event that will never be reproduced, ever, and I witness the whole shabang live in theatres.
Barry, A TV Show that really surprised me on so many levels.
Bocksmart, probably the sweetest teenager movie in a while.
Buffy The Vampire Slayer, rewatching one of my favorite TV Show for the hundredth time
Game of Thrones, The Long Night from, let’s just say my most intense TV hour of the week (apart from rewatching The Body)
Midsommar, Another exceptional Horror movie from Ari Aster, he’s a talent to look out for
Mindhunters, watching David Fincher construct scenes is just mesmerizing, people talking can be so intense and interesting.
Orange is the new Black: an emotional and a very satisfying ending.
Peanut Butter Falcon, Shia is just a mesmerizing actor to watch and the movie is so sweet without ever being corny.
Rick and Morty, for a long time I avoided it, but now I can’t get enough, fucking hilarious.
The Sazorac, my new favorite cocktail, if done right, and at home, it’s always done right!
Stranger Things, it keeps its quality high even with season 3.
Tool, a new Album after 13 years, not their best but who cares, it’s fucking TOOL.
Toy Story 4, A very emotional and damn fine ending to Woody’s arch.
Tschernobyl, The best 6 Hours on TV this year, I keep telling everyone to watch it.
Unbelievable, a nice surprise of a crime show with very good leads, I was hooked.

Things I didn’t like

6 Underground, Michael Bay in overdrive and unchecked. I was bored after 5 minutes.
Dark Phoenix, giving Simon Kinberg all these X-Men Movies to play with wasn’t a good idea.
Game of Thrones, Yes it’s on both lists. That ending, man oh man.
Glas, he should have stopped after Unbreakable, this one was not necessary.
Hellboy, another unnecessary sequel/reboot.
MIB International, Aaaaand another one, they just keep on making crappy sequel/reboots.
Star Wars Rise of the Skywalkers, yap a Star Wars movie is on this list, what a huge disappointment this movie was.

What else did I do?

Learned working more extensively with Git
got heavily into automation of workflows
started to play around with Rest API
Worked and tinkered too much on SoaPatrickSix
Thought too much about making movies (instead of doing it)
Stopped walking through every street in Basel
Oh and yeah, I turned 40 this year

2019 in Numbers

I’m a statistic nut and it’s always fun to check some numbers from the past year. So I collected some infos on various topics:

I wrote 48 Blog Post Entries (9’317 words)
I shot 3 Short Movies (6 minutes total runtime)
I posted 22 Fotos on Instagram
I watched 105 Movies
I watched 575+ TV Episodes

If I look at these numbers and if I have any new years resolutions for 2020 it would to be increase the numbers for the first three, especially since those numbers were bigger in 2018 (139 Blog Posts and 59 Fotos on Instagram for example).

Oh and by the way, I wrote 333 Blog Posts and 82’820 Words in the last Century, not bad.

Using Bitbucket Pipelines

In my last post (I know it’s been awhile) I described my use of Buddy.Works for the deployment process. Well since Bitbucket uses it’s own deployment pipelines and because for work it was better to use the same tool for everything, I started to read up on pipelines.

The result is a bitbucket-pipelines.yml file for my Bitbucket Repository which handles the build and deployment process.

image: node:10.15.3

pipelines:
  branches:
    master:
    - step:
        name: Build CSS
        caches:
          - node
        script:
          - npm install -g gulp
          - npm install
          - gulp sass
        artifacts:
          - style.css
    - step:
        name: Deploy Theme
        deployment: production
        script:
          - pipe: atlassian/rsync-deploy:0.3.2
            variables:
              USER: '$REMOTE_USER'
              SERVER: '$REMOTE_SERVER'
              REMOTE_PATH: '$REMOTE_PATH'
              LOCAL_PATH: '/opt/atlassian/pipelines/agent/build/'
              EXTRA_ARGS: '--exclude-from=deployment-exclude-list.txt'

I’m only working with a master branch but of course you could expand that to a staging site with a development branch as well.

The first step builds the CSS out of the SCSS file and the second step uses rsync to copy the changed files from the repository to the remote server. There’s also a deployment-exclude-list.txt with a few files which don’t need to be copied.

Deployment now takes around 30-40 seconds and it’s all neatly integrated into Bitbucket, which is kinda nice.

For now I won’t use Buddy.Works for a while, even though they have some very nice features and keep on adding new ones, like Lighthouse testing. But maybe Bitbucket will add new features as well or I will find out how to include Lighthouse testing into my pipelines as well.