A pages/blog/2020-in-review.md

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+---
+template:
+url: 2020-in-review
+title: 2020 in review
+subtitle: Oh boy, here we go
+date: 2020-12-24
+---
+
+It's been a little over 9 months since the day I left my university
+dorms (got kicked out, rather), in light of <span class="lol">the
+pandemic</span>. I have my finals going on right now, and 5 days to go
+for the next examination -- a great time to reflect on what I managed to
+do this year. So here I am, sitting at my little home office-thing, with
+a bad cold -- as is tradition during December -- writing this post.
+Let's get to it!
+
+
+## interning at CometChat
+
+I spent a good part of this year interning at
+[CometChat](https://www.cometchat.com), mostly working as an
+infrastructure engineer. I dabbled with some pretty neat tech -- here's
+a quick list of things I worked on:
+
+- XMPP over WebSockets (RFC 7395). Also wrote
+    [wsabi](https://git.icyphox.sh/wsabi) -- a WebSocket proxy in Nim.
+    Never got used, but cool nonetheless.
+- On-premise (bare metal) deployment of our stack using Docker Swarm.
+- Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) deployment of our stack.
+
+I think there's value in adding that I experienced a paradigm shift in
+my view of tools like Kubernetes. I still think they're bloated and
+abstraction heavy, but they exist to solve a problem -- and they do it
+somewhat okay. In an ideal world, nobody would fall for the "cloud"
+meme, and wouldn't toss everything into a container[^docker-meme] -- but
+our world is far from that.
+
+[^docker-meme]: https://i.imgur.com/3eTKEZp.jpg
+
+## things I made
+
+- [shlide](https://git.icyphox.sh/shlide): A slide deck presentation
+    tool written in pure bash. Born from a conversation I had with a
+    friend -- quickly hacked it together over a weekend. Even used it
+    for a talk I presented!
+- [vite](https://git.icyphox.sh/vite): Go rewrite of the static site
+    generator I wrote in Python, way back in 2018. It was a misnomer,
+    since it was far from _vite_.
+
+## other hackery
+
+Self-hosted a _bunch_ of services on my Pi. The only downtime is when my
+ISP goes down, which is thankfully not _that_ often. Here's a list of
+things running on my Pi right now:
+
+- [radicale](https://radicale.org): Cal/CardDAV server
+- [Pleroma](https://pleroma.social): Single-user federated social media
+    instance
+- [filehost](https://x.icyphox.sh)
+- [gonic](https://github.com/sentriz/gonic): Music streaming server
+- [crxn](http://deavmi.assigned.network/docs/crxn/site/): Cool network
+    of cool people.
+- Few other things that [Nerdy](https://peppe.rs) uses.
+
+My OpenBSD install is still going strong! Started at 6.6, now on
+6.8-current. This is most definitely my endgame OS -- everything just
+works, and works very well.
+
+I played [r2wars this year](/blog/r2wars-2020), which was hella fun. A
+good exercise in assembly programming. I even placed 3rd, so that was
+awesome.
+
+## this blog
+
+Evidently, this site has undergone quite a few visual changes. It's no
+longer that all-black with white text, with occasional bits of cyan. My
+overall aesthetic has considerably mellowed down -- prioritizing good
+typography over colors.
+
+```console
+$ cat pages/blog/*.md | grep 'date: 2020-' | wc -l
+      26
+```
+
+26 posts this year (including this)! That's 8 more than the 18 I wrote
+last year -- roughly 1 post every two weeks. Pretty good variety too --
+some technical, some less so...and some controversial. Heh.
+
+## onward and upward
+
+Contrary to popular opinion, 2020 wasn't all that bad -- obviously, I
+only speak for myself. That said, I'm looking forward to 2021 for a
+number of reasons: for one, I'll be done with college (finally!), and
+starting a full-time job at a company I find really exciting!
+
+I have a few blog post ideas that I didn't get around to writing this
+year, so expect to see a few of those. The new job will involve a lot of
+infra-related work -- I'm certain my incredibly sought after insights on
+those things will find their way here.
+
+Anyway, I'm going to enjoy the rest of this year playing Runeterra and
+Halo MCC. On to greater things in 2021, and I'll see you next year!

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