January 2025

Hello!

That’s the first month of 2025 in the books. This was definitely a busy one!

Richmond, Virginia got a surprising amount of snow this month; it snowed three times, and two of those actually had some accumulation. That’s a bit rare for this part of the world!

In the immediate aftermath of that first snow, Richmond had a water plant outage, which ultimately led to most of the city running out of water completely. Though mildly annoying, M and I got through it — I just worked from home for a few days and had to deal with feeling like I desperately needed a shower for far longer than I would have liked. I do love the snow, though, so it was really nice to have a bit of a winter wonderland in our city.

I worked on a few fun projects outside of work this month:

I commissioned Shamian on Fiverr to create a poster of Lana, which turned out amazing:

@shamian.bsky.social designed this amazing poster of my dog, Lana. Thanks so much! (www.fiverr.com/shamian_/cra…)

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— Joe Woods (@joewoods.dev) January 19, 2025 at 8:40 AM

I worked on a database of shelf-stable lunch foods, which is now live at lunch.lol. I honestly don’t think this turned out quite how I wanted it to, but maybe this is just the v0 of something that will turn into a v1 one day.

I also had a fun time configuring and deploying Glance for a new web browser home page:

Just deployed Glance (github.com/glanceapp/gl…) to @fly.io, and the user experience for both was really great. Mildly concerned that I'm going to want to use fly.io as the hammer for every nail now.

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— Joe Woods (@joewoods.dev) January 11, 2025 at 4:58 PM

As part of this, I also got to try out fly.io, which I really like, and think I’m going to use for my personal projects going forward.

I also revamped my habits to work better with my daily todo tracking system. I’m not going to share all my daily habits, but it is really nice to have a solid process that feels like a good foundation to continuously improving.

Finally: this month, I participated in No Jeans January and did not wear jeans. As someone whose daily uniform was probably 90% blue jeans and 9% black jeans, this was a pretty big shift in my attire. 🙂

music

films

This month, I watched 2 films:

  • Mary Shelley — ★★☆☆☆
  • Rush Hour — no rating

Have I mentioned that I love Letterboxd? You can follow me there.

books

Wow, I didn’t finish any books this month! I’m currently re-reading Matter by Iain M. Banks, but pretty slowly, apparently.

food

I’m on a quest to go to every restaurant in Richmond that has vegan food.. This month, I visited one restaurant for the first time. (Not a great result for this quest!)

failbetter

This month, failbetter published:

stats

This month:

  • I typed 811,557 keys and clicked 108,804 times.
  • I listened to 1,176 songs.