A Year of Blogging (2022)
As 2018 ended, I had successfully blogged every week for the entire year. This was a new years resolution that I've somehow kept for now four years and counting.
So lets recap my favorite posts from 2022.
This post I wrote after I saw people complaining online that this random company was donating $500 to open source and that was too little. I thought it was extremely odd to see people unaware of what open source donations and offerings even are. So I took some values from my own projects and wrote up a post.
This post was from a bit of annoyances over the years - from getting alerts from services for having a regular expression vulnerable project. Yeah sure - that seems severe when the only thing capable of abusing that is code that needs to be code reviewed and then built. On top of Apktool getting a debatable security flaw reported that netted the discoverer $170 - which was more than half of any money I'd made supporting Apktool at the time.
A new Halo game came out and I really wanted to like it, but it kept disappointing me time and time again. Whether it was bugs, broken playlists or another battle pass cash grab - it was maddening. It seems like this is a new toxicity that is affecting all new video games. Ever since Fortnite made stacks on a new game model - every other game tried to copy.
However, even though I quickly lost interest in the new Halo I did build a new stat site for the game. Much like every major Halo game I attempt to make a site using a new type of framework/language. I really enjoyed Laravel Livewire and thus wrote this post documenting my journey for this project.
As I went through older photos I found it very interesting that I had documented some events in history that were large enough to have Wikipedia pages. This might be an ice storm or flood - so I started adding posts to the History tag. So I enjoyed researching and pulling old photos of the Lake of the Ozark flood.
After a tip from a friend - I started researching what I believed to be scam. It all started when I started getting solar salesman at my door shilling a product that was not in my favor. When I found this Penny Hoarder site - it just screamed of scams. I couldn't believe how many people actually used this site. It seemed sad how many people might spend 45 minutes of their time to win 11 cents unaware they probably earned the company behind it a dollar.
As hinted at above - I did begin extracting some audio and screenshots from the various solar folks to visit my house. I used these interactions to research the claims they put forward to see if they were valid or not. These were fun posts to write as it just helped further cement my belief that solar panels at this point and house in my life is not worth it.
Finally, a weird encounter in my life where someone was impersonating me in order to gain employment at a company. This investigation and blog ended up going quite viral going to the top of Hacker News and netting roughly 100,000 unique views in one day. Turns out as days became weeks after this release - this is a large common trend occurring in the employment space. I hope to finish the follow up research for this soon.
2023 is arriving and I'll still be here blogging weekly. Thanks for reading and here is to another year.