2024-12-21 08:00:00
It’s the shortest day of the year today, at least if you’re living on the same half of the globe as me, and this means that from tomorrow on we’re moving towards summer!
Okay, that might be a little optimistic, but at least the days will begin to get longer again soon. This year the grey and dark German weather is really getting to me, so I can’t wait for it to be over. Let’s have a look at some links to while away the time.
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2024-12-13 08:00:00
Today I learned that many Americans decorate their Christmas trees as early as late November, right after Thanksgiving. This was news to me and now I’m wondering if Americans celebrate Christmas under a bone-dry skelton of a tree where all the needles have fallen off weeks ago? We put our trees up on Christmas Eve and take them down on January 6th, and by then they are very dry and are losing needles like crazy. Anyway, let’s have a look at some links.
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2024-12-06 08:00:00
Ho ho ho! It’s St. Nicholas’ Day today, and in order to celebrate here’s a linkdump that has absolutely nothing to do with that, because I don’t actually have any christmas related links in store, so… here’s your regular Friday linkdump. Enjoy!
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2024-12-01 08:00:00
I think it’s time for me to look back at 2024 and say goodbye to it. If you’re thinking “wait a minute, there’s an entire month left, isn’t there?” - yes there is. But I’m done with 2024, I’m ending it early. A lot has happened this year, some of it good, some not so good, and I feel it was enough. I’m ready to move on. I wrote a lot of stuff down over the last week or so, and I thought why not share a condensed version of it here with you?
In order to make sense of the events of 2024, I realised it’s actually necessary to look back at 2023, because a lot of the stuff this year is a continuation of things that happened last year. It’s almost as if events in life are connected! Anyway, let’s recap.
In January 2023 I started a new job. And it was a great job! I liked the company, I liked the product, I liked the colleagues, I especially liked the atmosphere and the location (the R&D department was in an old factory building that was newly renovated, and everything was very bright and friendly and modern while still retaining the old spirit of the building - it felt like working in a fancy startup that had its offices in a Brooklyn factory loft even though it was an old-established company in a small town in Germany). It was pretty great working there.
And then it wasn’t.
The company had to file for bankruptcy in the middle of the year and then everything went south really fast. Nobody knew what was going to happen, there was a lot of uncertainty and I was constantly wondering, would I be able to keep the job or not? What was going to happen to the company? Should I stay there and wait it out or go looking for a new job? I decided to stay and eventually we were bought out by a competitor so the company was saved, but a lot of people were laid off, many dear colleagues disappeared (some literally from one day to the next) and the place just wasn’t the same afterwards. Especially since the owners of the company did their absolute best to communicate as little and as badly as possible with the workforce, which put further strain on everything.
Also in January a relationship of four years ended which was obviously not a great experience and left me feeling pretty depressed and empty for a while. I managed to stay in touch and continue a friendship with my ex though, which was ultimately a good outcome, all things considered.
I’ve already written about how the professional side of 2024 went here and here. Work in the company continued under the new ownership, and for a short while it looked as if things were improving… but the sales figures never recovered, the company kept losing money and I started wondering how long the new owners would continue to put up with this.
I found out in early June when I turned up to work one day, discovered that my login wasn’t working anymore and was then called into the boss’s office to be informed that the company was reducing its headcount further and that I was laid off. I had to leave my company issued phone and laptop with them and then I was shown the door, literally. It was abrupt and shocking and left me confused and angry and quite disoriented.
This kind of sent me into a mini depression for the rest of the month, and it took some time to dig myself out of it. At the end of the day it was for the best because I wasn’t happy there anymore anyway, I got a paid long vacation out of it and the company is still in decline from what I hear from former colleagues, so it wouldn’t have gotten better anyway.
I took some time to recover and reflect and detox and I started a new job in November, four weeks ago. Happy ending, right? Well… It is another very corporate job, with tons of overly complicated structures being in place that make work unneccessarily hard at times. And the division I’m in is also in the process of being sold to new owners, so there’s some uncertainty over the future of the company as well.
It’s not all bad there either, the colleagues are nice, the work is interesting and the commute is great (the office is just about a kilometre away from home), so I’m going to stay there for now. But I’m also starting to feel that I don’t want to spend the next 25 years until retirement in the corporate world.
How about my private life then?
I started dating again after a year of being single and happy with it early this year. And experienced all the “great” things about dating in the modern world… Going on a series of dates that ultimately went nowhere, being ghosted several times, meeting people who were clearly no ready for a relationship (with one person telling me after a few dates that she was not able to work and in therapy because she was suffering from a severe depression and she was looking for a relationship to help her out of that. Next).
I also met a few people who were great but the chemistry wasn’t there and I had to tell them that this wasn’t going to turn into more, which sucks but is also part of life.
And then I met someone in the summer who was great, we had a lot of fun together and got along really well, so we started a relationship pretty quickly, and things were good.
But they didn’t stay this way. It was over as quickly as it had started, the relationship ended after three months in a way that still leaves me puzzled and that I had never experienced before and hope to never experience again. This is highly personal so I don’t know how much I want to talk about it here (and there’s another person involved whose privacy has to be respected), but there is a lot for me to reflect and think about in the coming weeks and months, and I’m sure I’ll write some of it down at some point.
So this was 2024 in a nutshell, and that’s where I’m at now. A lot of stuff happened, some good, some bad and some I’m definitely sure I didn’t deserve and that should have been handled better by the other party (which is not to say that I’m perfect and never make mistakes. I do. All the time.)
So, dear 2024, we are done here. This year is over for me, it had 11 months and I’m fine with it, I’m ready to move on.
So was 2024 a terrible year then?
No. It was eventful, and not all of the events were pleasant, but there were also a lot of lessons hidden in these events, especially the bad ones. And the only way this would be a bad or a lost year would be if I didn’t learn anything from it. If I didn’t take the time to reflect and think about what happened, how it happened and what I can take away from it for the future.
And that’s what I’m going to do with the rest of this year. Go over everything, figure out the what and how and why and do my best to learn from it so I don’t find myself in these types of situations again in the future. And then put it aside and move forward.
2024-11-29 08:00:00
Another week, another linkdump! And what a week it’s been, boy am I glad it’s over. So here’s a few links for you to start the weekend.
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2024-11-22 08:00:00
Friday has arrived, which means it’s time for another linkdump to start the weekend right. At least the online part of the weekend. Please don’t spend your entire weekend on your computer :)
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