2023-12-30 - The year behind and the year ahead

Let me start by quickly wishing all Geminauts of the Gregorian persuasion a happy and healthy start to the upcoming new year!

2023 was the year that I made a conscious effort to return to something resembling "active duty" as leader of the Gemini project. I for one am quite happy with how that effort turned out. I'm under no illusion that I moved mountains, but then I also know that I never intended to. I very deliberately aimed for a slow and steady pace and focussed first on minor housekeeping tasks. I wanted to play it safe with regard to avoiding any repeated burn out and I wanted to do things that rekindled my sense of investedness in the project and the community. I think that part went really well.

It's true that I set some concrete goals for more "real" work by the end of 2023, such as getting the mailing list archives available in Gemtext from geminiprotocol.net, and also migrating from the "old" (though still currently official) protocol specification to the two new more formal documents, which I haven't met. That's not because I don't care about them or don't know what to do, it's simply that I was a bit optimistic about how much time and energy I would have left toward the end of the year to switch to those things. November and December were really very busy and stressful for me at work and so I couldn't end the year on a bang with this personal project. I'm sure some people are disappointed by this (I am too!), but I guess anybody still paying attention at this point is used to being patient. I'm moving the deadline for the things I intended to finish this year to the end of the first quarter of next year, and I'm doing so with confidence that I can meet that deadline.

That leaves the second three quarters of 2024 open, which is good, because I have a lot of other irons in the fire, too. I have plans which I've hinted at previously in this news feed and also others which I have only discussed with people privately. A lot of things will happen next year, and I hope that by the end of it we'll be much, much closer to having the sense of closure, completeness and finality that I'm sorry to have kept so many people waiting such a long time for.