Happy (belated) new year

 I was going to write a new years post. Suddenly it's almost February.

Last year I had the goal of writing at least 1 blog post a month.

 I was inspired by Tyler Cipriani who wrote a post talking about his goal of writing at least once a month. It seemed like a reasonable goal to help practice writing. I've often wanted to maintain a blog in the past, but would always find I petered out after a few posts. So last year I set myself the goal of at least once a month.

How'd I do?

Ok I guess. I wrote 9 blog posts last year. Short of my goal of 12, but still not terrible. Looking back, I realize that I wrote 9 in 2023 and 11 in 2022, so I guess the goal didn't actually increase my writing. Nonetheless I'm still pretty happy that I was writing posts throughout the year.

Based on blogger's internal analytics, it seems like people like when I do CTF writeups. For some unclear reason my post about MUDCon got a tremendous amount of views relative to my other posts. However, the real goal is more to practice writing than to get views, so I suppose it doesn't matter much. That said, I do write the CTF writeups in the hope that others can learn from them, so it is nice to see that people read them.

On to next. Maybe this year I'll actually make it to once a month - I'd like to keep going with this goal. I think I'll try and write more shorter off the cuff things (Like this) and less big technical posts.

This year

While its already been a month and I've already mostly forgotten about my goals. But I did write some down.

I want this to be a year of trying new things. I want to try and branch out to new a different things.

I want to explore my creative side a bit more. To be clear, I do think there is a lot of creativity in computer programming, but I also want to try more traditionally creative things. Paint some pictures! I've been taking a beginner acrylic painting class at the local community center, which has been great so far. Maybe I should try and join the two interests and make a silly computer game.

I'd also like to explore different computer things. I've been doing MediaWiki stuff for a while now, but I don't want that to be the only thing I ever do. I'd like to try and direct my open source contributions towards things I haven't done before. Maybe things that are more low level than php web apps. Perhaps I should learn rust! I'd like to work on stuff where I feel like I'm learning and I think it would be cool to spend some time learning more about traditional CS concepts (algorithms and what not). Its been a long time since I was in university and learning about that sort of thing. Maybe it would be fun to brush up. In my current programming work its very rare for that sort of thing to be relevant.

Where I do keep with open source contributions in the MediaWiki/Wikimedia sphere of influence, I want to work on things that are unique or new. Things that, whether they are good or bad ideas, at least open up new possibilities for discussion. I can't help but feel that MediaWiki land has been a little stagnant. So many of the core ideas are from late 2000s. They've been incrementally improved upon, but there really isn't anything new. Both in Wikimedia land and in third party MediaWiki land.  Perhaps that is just a sign of a maturing ecosystem, but I think its time to try some crazy new ideas. Some will work and some will fail, but I want to feel like I'm working on something new that makes people think of the possibilities, not just improving what is already there (Not that there is anything wrong with that, maintenance is critical and under appreciated, its just not what i want to work on right now, at least not as a volunteer)

I think I've gotten a start in that direction with the calculator project that WikiProject med funded me to do. It spurned a lot of interesting discussion and ideas, which is the sort of thing I want to be involved with.

Maybe I'll explore Wikidata a bit more. I always found RDF databases kind of interesting.

On the third party MW side, I've felt for a long time that we could use some different ideas for querying and reporting in MediaWiki (Cargo and SMW is cool, but I don't think they quite make the right trade-offs). I'd love to explore ideas in that space a little bit.

So in conclusion, what is the yearly goals?

• I think I want to be a little more intentional in planning out my life
• I want my open source MediaWiki contribs to be more along prototyping new and unique ideas. I want to avoid being sucked into just fixing things at Wikimedia (After all, that's why WMF allegedly has paid staff).
• I want to try and pursue creative hobbies outside of computer programming.
• I want to try and do more programming outside of my MediaWiki comfort zone.

See you back here this time next year to see how I did.

Signpost article on {{Calculator}}

 The most recent issue of the Wikipedia Signpost published an article I wrote about the {{calculator}} series of templates, which I worked on.

 The signpost is Wikipedia's internal newspaper. I read it all the time. Its really cool to have contributed something to it. 

So what's this all about?

Essentially I was hired by Wiki Project Med, to make a script to add medical calculators to their wiki, MDWiki.  For example, you might have a calculator to calculate BMI, where the reader enters their weight and height. After being used on MDWiki, the script made its way to Wikipedia.

 The goal of this was to make something user programmable, so that users could solve their own problems without having to wait on developers. The model we settled on was a spreadsheet-esque one. You can define cells that readers can write in, and you can define other cells that update based on some formula.

Later we also allowed manipulating CSS, to provide more interactivity. This opened up a surprising number of opportunities, such as interactive diagrams and demonstrations.

See the Signpost article for more details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2025-01-15/Technology_report and let me know what you think.