Noel De Martin @noeldemartin@noeldemartin.social

Back to my Happy Place!

I'm looking forward to doing a lot more of this in 2025 (design + code) 😁.

And Happy New Year! I hope you can also spend time doing what you enjoy! What is your Happy Place?

Anyhow, if you want to learn more about my trip, both about the "life stuff" and the "tech stuff", you can get a full recount in my website. Also including some pictures!

https://noeldemartin.com/tasks/taking-a-sabbatical

Still, I also managed to get some "work" done. I tinkered with a couple proofs of concept, and I started exploring some new tools and libraries.

Lately I had forgotten that it's also important to play, instead of working on "big projects" all the time.

If this trip has taught me something, it is how much I enjoy my usual routine and how much I appreciate my "normal" life.

Don't get me wrong, I like to travel and have new experiences. But you can have too much of a good thing, and for me that was 3 months of "holidays".

After 103 days, 34 cities, and 9 countries... I'm finally back home 🥳.

Last week, I came back from a 3 months sabbatical traveling around Asia (and New Zealand!). This may sound great on paper (and it was), but for the last couple of months I couldn't wait to be back 😅.

By the way, I just added the ability to import movies from your Netflix viewing activity. If you hadn't, maybe this is your excuse to start using Media Kraken!

Like every year, I just dressed my apps for the Christmas season :D.

It's quite silly, but I always enjoy doing these things. It also gives me a chance to work on some issues, and look at each app at least once a year.

It's also funny how my situation right now is very similar to my situation back then. I've changed in many ways (yes, I also cringe reading some of that blog post 😅), but the core is the same :).

I hope the next 10 years are just as fun!

10 years ago today, I launched my personal website :D. It's been one of the best decisions of my life. Jobs and platforms come and go, but my website has been a constant outlet that will remain. I wish everyone I met had a personal website!

https://noeldemartin.com/blog/starting-something-new

I mean, just look at the ending remarks:

"Umai shows us that Solid is a vision worth striving for. A vision where we can all have our cake and eat it too. And have the recipe for it. Securely stored in our POD."

🤣

Still, it wasn't all smooth sailing. I had to tweak it multiple times to get a decent result. But I'm happy with how it turned out. So I may look into this further, let me know what you think!

These journals are a bit all over the place, but there's a lot of interesting information in there. I always thought that AI would be useful to make them easier to consume, and this podcast format is perfect.

If you're curious about how I created Umai, and you haven't read my development journals, I just generated a podcast with NotebookLM. Plug this in your favorite podcast app to give it a listen (or click to listen in the browser): https://noeldemartin.com/podcast/feed.xml

Having said that, Dan's talk has made me reconsider my opinion on Bluesky. I trust him, and I don't believe he'd be lying to our faces. So I may dig into the details to learn more.

Not only that, apparently Bluesky is not even living up to their own ideals (TLDR: Bluesky is not really decentralized... "yet"): https://beige.party/@possibledog/113367997579738126

And in case you're wondering, yes, the Bluesky team did know about Solid. Before announcing the AT protocol, they did an "ecosystem review" in which they studied all the existing solutions they would proceed to ignore: https://gitlab.com/bluesky-community1/decentralized-ecosystem/-/blob/master/README.md

Solid has been around for a while, long before Bluesky, but it hasn't managed to pick up any traction. I wonder how Bluesky managed to attract talented developers like Dan and others. It can't just be "the money"... right?

But there are also some things I like from Bluesky. I really like what they did with encryption, and the way users control their identities seems a lot more straightforward.

Besides the universal data formats, I also prefer Solid because of its focus on private data. The AT protocol seems more focused on public data and social interactions. If anything, I see it as an alternative to ActivityPub, not Solid.

This is what I wrote:

25:20 If you're interested in a "galaxy brain" solution, check out the Solid Protocol. It is very similar to what Dan explains in this presentation, but it has universal formats, and it was created by the person who created the actual web (Tim Berners-Lee).