I'm trying out my new email sending system for notifications and newsletters (written by me, email server handled by Postmark) for this one: apologies if it does something odd.

First off, Happy New Year to all of my readers! I'm afraid I've been rather slack on publishing for the last few weeks as many of my spoons for the last few months have been consumed by personal shit (a few of my other blog posts go into more detail), but the reflective end/beginning of year post is a tradition and I'd feel bad were I to deprive my readers of that.

Fortunately, while the year ahead is likely to be hard and horrific in a general sense, I have good reason to hope that it will bring more agency and capacity to act for me personally. We begin the year with a death and a burial, but as hard as that is, it is the end of a rather painful process that has been going on for the last four years. My hope is thus that this year can be a year for endings, new beginnings and renewed energy towards the things that are important to me: my personal relationships, writing and building my consultancy.

The following are some notes in brief about the past year and my plans for the year to come: they're not hugely structured, but hopefully will be of interest.

The blog

I started 2024 year with a vague idea that I should drop the idea of employment and start working for myself, but very little else. I'd emailed Ludicity at the end of the previous year, which in hindsight proved to be a very wise move, but I hadn't anticipated all that much to come of it. Evidently, I was wrong.

Looking back from the perspective of 2025, while it's early days yet I've made some serious progress. In the five months that I've been writing my blog, I've garnered 23,204 page views from 13,204 unique visitors: clearly something that I'm writing is resonating with people. When I started this I had no expectation of an audience or that anyone would read it: while I knew that I was, in some sense, a good writer, I didn't think anyone was interested in what I had to say, and this was in many ways primarily written so that I had something proactive that I could do to build my career, and get my thoughts in order as well. The response has really surprised me: I've received a considerable amount of reader mail expressing that my writing has helped people feel better and less alone, and that my analysis has helped them put some of the stuff that they've observed but couldn't articulate into words. That's meant a lot to me, and is a large part of the reason why I've been able to keep writing so long as I have this time. So, thank you to all of you who have read my blog, all of you who've written, and everyone who got value from it. I hope to continue doing that in the year to come, in ways that I've detailed below.

Writing projects

My writing practice is as follows: I have an Obsidian vault of blog posts in progress. When I have an idea for a blog post, I create a new empty note and leave it there, along with some notes of what I was thinking about at the time. I also have a decent chunk of each week blocked out for reading and research, and I'll take notes while doing that. As this happens, parts of articles coalesce in my brain, and when I get a big enough chunk, I'll pull out the article note and write that paragraph. Eventually enough chunks come together and I'll sit down and finish the blog post: so far, I've not really been editing my posts much, but I'd like to have more of an editing process going into the new year (I hope against hope that I'll have the spoons to do it).

I've wanted to do some more technical writing for a while now, but I find it weirdly scary: I'm a very good writer and an excellent statistician and applied mathematician, but all the software engineering I've learned has been self-taught, and while I'm good at it (I built my blog from the ground up, and it basically works, which regrettably means that I'm an above average dev: the bar is that low in my country), I have weird gaps in my knowledge and think about strangely, so I worry about putting it out there. I also want to write more about art and music, but that's also spooky. Still, if I want to build technical credibility, I really should, so I'll just have to harden up and do it.

To that end, here are preview snippets of a few things that I'm intending to work on in the new year:

• An article about the extreme degree to which the modern economy runs on violating consent (informed significantly by my experiences of trying to do sales and marketing without violating consent or being pushier than I'd like). In short, we allow a level of coercion in our economy that would translate into serious abuse in a personal relationship.
• An article detailing how Clausewitz has informed my thinking about software engineering strategy and operations.
• An article about what I'm good at technically and why, and how I came to be doing the work that I do.
• An article about slow processes, and the fact that I've somehow way made more progress on my website and blog (which I've worked on slowly and completely as I've felt the will to do it), than I have on a number of past projects in my employment where there's been pressure to work very, very fast.

There is obviously quite a bit more than this in the works, but these are the articles that I think have the most to them at the moment. I'm also hoping to pitch a few articles to more established media in 2025: getting a few things published outside of my own blog would be good for my public profile and my efforts at establishing credibility.

Economics

Towards the end of last year I was lucky enough to land my first two contracts. While they didn't go as I might have hoped they would, this is still a sign that something is going kinda right with my business: apparently getting new business primarily through a blog kinda works for me. To that end, I'm aiming to land three larger contracts this year, along with some number of smaller ones, and aiming at $200,000 NZD in revenue this year. This is an ambitious goal, to be sure, but I think it's one that's in principle doable. This means, of course, that I'll be writing a lot more this year, and also that I'll be attempting to learn how to do marketing and sales in an effective way. One early priority for me is going to be to work hard on building a more specialised offering: my first projects were unpleasant for me in part because I was still quite vague on my exact offerings.

The issue, of course, is that I'm not entirely sure what to specialise in. I have a few areas that I really enjoy: I'm a brilliant statistician, I'm really quite good with databases by this point, and I enjoy building websites from scratch and building fun visualisations in JavaScript. I also have a lot of fun writing C and setting up infrastructure, and I enjoy consulting and helping software teams build a good work culture. Finally, I really love writing Python for various ad-hoc tasks and just generally having a helpful scripting language around. And of course, I really love writing. The issue is that there isn't much cohesive glue holding these things together, and in general, I can't think of a cohesive offering using most of these skills that makes sense. I was toying with "I enjoy HTML/CSS, I love databases and I want to build systems with as little stuff between those layers as possible", but who knows how practical that'd be. Above all, I would absolutely kill for the opportunity to work with people and companies that I actually like on a personal level, and I think that's going to be my goal for the next year: find people who have lots of money to spend on software whom I like and who vibe with me. This might be a slightly difficult challenge, but we'll see what can be done.

A related concern is that I worry that I've burned out on actually writing code to a degree. It's a strange thing: I can write code personally for my own projects, and they go well enough, but I cannot stand the thought of working on another shitty, ill-organised codebase and being consistently ignored when I point out that things like "unit tests" or "modularity" aren't optional nice-to-haves in an engineering context, but are by contrast vital parts of any system. I just... cannot do that any more. To that end, if I can't get work with clients who share my philosophy on code, I would probably have to consider reorienting a bit around technical work that doesn't involve writing extensive amounts of code. I can manage an ad-hoc script or two, but probably not more than that. Unfortunately, options for that kind of work can be a bit thin on the ground.

I'd also like to bring in at least a bit of income from my writing this year: while I have a Liberapay and a Patreon, I'd like to get some additional options set up, and (within reason) figure out how to encourage people to pitch in. I absolutely despise asking for money, so this is difficult for me, but honestly, being able to pay at least one of my regular bills from blog income would be really helpful: $350 NZD/week would cover my rent, and while that will doubtless take some work to do, even that would buy a certain level of independence from relying on clients that would go an awfully long way. My hope is that in the first few months I can figure out a way of asking that my readers won't find to be obnoxious beyond belief. I've also been considering looking at other places where I might be able to syndicate my writing: being able to tap into network effects is, after all, a really effective way of building a readership, and as much as I'd like to be a purist about this, the fact is that I probably can't afford not to be a bit mercenary.

Through my writing, I've built a decent email list, and I have explicitly asked for permission to send out a monthly newsletter to my subscribers, which many of my subscribers have given me. This means that I should probably get around to actually writing a newsletter and figuring out what to do with it. I'm still disinclined to make it too much of a marketing document, but unlike my blog (which first and foremost focuses on quality writing and analysis), I might let myself go a little bit more with this one: post some links, some personal updates, and keep people informed in general terms of where I'm at in building my business. Doing marketing without it feeling massively sleazy is hard, dammit!

Politics

So, we obviously have a serious political problem going into the new year.

Personally, my first priority is going to be getting all my infrastructure out of the USA. My website and suchlike are currently hosted on Vercel, and while I keep my stuff in the Australian region, it is still a US-based company. Given that I post a lot about politics and LGBT stuff, I don't trust the incoming regime not to try and enforce censorship, and that means I need to find alternatives! My current intention is to try and self-host Coolify on a remote server, maybe via Hetzner. I might still need to rely on Cloudflare for tunnels and security, which I don't love, but so it goes. The scariest part of this for me is going to be figuring out security, which I've not had to think about beyond the basics so far, but needs must. If I can afford it, I think I'd also like to set up an actual, physical home server for some of this kind of stuff to act as an additional layer of redundancy, but that's a secondary concern. I'll also need to figure out how to self-host gitlab or something similar for similar reasons. Again, I imagine that shouldn't be too hard, but it's still new stuff to learn for me.

That being out of the way, I'm good at writing, so I will aim to keep doing so, keep publishing and keep dismantling bullshit where I see it. Depending on how things go, I might also try my hand at some more investigative/research/"real journalism" type work, though I don't know what my resources would be like. I do strongly believe that continuing to do research and analysis and write about what we believe to be true, especially when it challenges power, is massively important. The way that fascism operates is to make us and the way we see the world seem marginal and isolated, and to make us silence ourselves without them having to actively repress us: writing and publishing is an excellent way to push back against that. Where possible, I'd also like to support other organisations fighting fascism with my skills, whether that be writing skills, statistics or helping people set up their own infrastructure. In this context, my being in New Zealand is a positive advantage, as it means I'm somewhat harder for the regime to fuck with.

An concluding paragraph

Going into 2025 is a conflicting experience. It's one where grief and pain is to be expected: many of my friends are scared and threatened, we're dealing with the looming threat of fascism and I have the impending loss of someone close to me fast approaching (as an aside, having a date for assisted dying set is such a weird experience for the people around the dying person (and I imagine the dying person themselves)). It's also a year that I'm going into with a lot more resources than I did at the beginning of any of my last few years: a nascent but growing blog, a strong professional and personal network, and end to the last four years of caring labour and a decent chunk of my bandwidth being occupied by and a small but meaningful payout (which one hopes will be forthcoming soon) that shall give me a few months to recover and build my business further. In short, I'm going into a dangerous situation, but I will also be significantly better-equipped to face that situation than I have been in the past. I know this won't be true for everyone, but it will be true for some of us.

So, if you at all can, be clever, be strategic, use your resources well and make 2025 hell for those who would make it awful for us. We probably can't stop every fascist out there, but we can sure as hell give an awful lot of them a bloody nose. Again, Happy New Year, everyone, and we'll be returning shortly with our first major article for the year.