Review of 2022⌗

In (unfortunately, wish I published more stuff…) my last post, I wrote about my goals for 2022. They were:

✅ Even more reading. 12 books minimum, 15 as a stretch goal.⌗

For 2022 I had a goal of reading twelve books. I started out kind of strong but then had a break for a few months during the spring. So the last month I’ve basically been reading nothing but Expanse novellas to try catching up. That is not what I strive for, so for this year I will have a lower count but try to be more consistant. I will try to get through Pandora’s Star by Peter F. Hamilton as well, and that’s a beast of 992 pages.

❌ Get a boat license, a “Forarintyg”⌗

Nope. This year we got Tove in the sea very late, around midsummer. I didn’t feel like spending time on getting a Forarintyg and haven’t gotten one. I should though…

✅ Complete the half Ironman I signed up for during a moment of especially ill thinking. This one will hurt.⌗

I did it! I was ill the week before - I was supposed to do the Vätternrundan (my fifth!) but I didn’t even start due to headache, a sore throat and something along the lines of a fever. The Ironman was both horrible and utterly fantastic! An Ironman 70.9 (aka a half Ironman) consist of a 1.9 km swim, a 90 km bike ride and a half marathon. When I signed up I didn’t realize that there are rather tight time caps at each of the stages. Swimming was awful and even though I had trained for it - all of the technique I had practiced flew out the window right at the start. I was uncertain whether I would make it or not for most of the swimming course, but finally made it with about 4 minutes to spare.

With the swim behind me I “ran” towards the transition area and changed from wet suit to bike outfit - not an easy feat when you are wet and maxed out on adrenaline. The bike stage was awesome. I knew that was my strong stage, but it feelt easier than I thought it was supposed to. It is about 1/3 the leghth of Vatternrundan and I was able to push most of the way. I gained more than an hour at that stage, which I was able to cash in on the running stage later. At the last stage, the 2.1 km run, I started to get tiered and worried of getting ingured or a cramp. I knew I had plenty of time, but I had thit nagging thought about getting injured. I think it was a counter reaction to the realization that I had time enough to basically walk through the whole stage, though I rightfully didn’t trust my math at that time. Anyway, I did finish, didn’t get injured - and will never do it again!

✅ Climb mt. Kebnekaise⌗

Last year, my good friend and I decided to do this. Back then, we aimed for autumn 2021 with the mindset of “how hard can it be?”. Back then we had hiked for about 30 km in total and we were missing a lot of necessary equipment. Thanks to him switching jobs (and some good sense I guess), we postponed the trip for a year. This gave us plenty of time to do “winter hiking”. The southern parts of Sweden seldom gets very cold these days, but we managed to get caught in somewhat of a snow storm on our first winter hike. We both loved it.

Fast forward to late August and we got on the train to Abisko. 26 hours later we arrive and start our hike towards Kebnekaise. After some last minute re-planning we ended up with about seven days of hiking, with the end-goal being Nikkaluokta. I will not be going in to details of the whole trip - that deserves its own post. What I will say is that everyone able to do such a trip must do it, for their own sake. It’s really something else to be without cell phone reception for seven days, walking for 8 hours a day and just live right in the moment together with a very good friend. When we arrived at the foot of Kebnekaise, we met two other hikers who advised us to try to do the climb today due to the amazing weather.

The sun was shining and visibility was 10/10. That was about 12:00, and before we had setup camp and all, the clock was 14:00. Little did we know, back then, it would take at least 9 hours to complete the climb and get down again. Anyway, we tried and walked for about 2 hours until we met a group of people and accompanying instructors. They strongly advised us to abort and try tomorrow instead, since the sun would set at the time we got to the summit. We heed their warning and got back to camp at around 18:00. The next day we got up at 06:00 and prepared us for the hike. An hour later we left camp and started walking. The instructors we met the day before told us that most people leave the Fjallstation at 07:00, and we had setup our camp about 3 km away, so we had a head start. It took about an hour before the fog thickened. We were able to see about 15 meters in front of us. As we progressed upwards, it thickened even further.

We reached the summit at around 14:00 if I recall correct. We were both freezing, my friend being worryingly cold. Luckily, there is an emergency cabin at the summit, so we went there to work up some heat. Back there we met a kind Frenchmen who got a candle lit for my friend and showed him some exercises to get the blood flowing to his fingers and toes. Yesterday’s sun had been replaced by rain/snow, 0-4°C and gusts at around 15 m/s. We got back to camp at about 18:00 and we’re both exhausted and euphoric that we had done it. My friend had a bad case of an ingrown nail and that was really acting up after 4 hours of downwards climbing. We also realized that tomorrow would be stressful, since we had to walk 24 km to get to Nikkaluokta, so we decided to pack our camp and get to the Fjallstation and see if we could sleep in a warm bed. They were of course out of beds, so we ended up sleeping in the kitchen. I got about 2 hours of sleep that night…

This ended up being quite a rant, sorry. Anyway, go book a hike NOW! You won’t ever regret it.

💣 Build and release something, again!⌗

I did build and release something, but I’m not sure it counts. The project, which ~is~ was hosted at Heroku, solved the problem that the Swedish podcast Flashback Forever had each episode twice in their Patreon feed - ie. both the ad free version and the non-ad free. My “proxy” removed the duplicate episode containing ads. It was a one-evening hack job I wrote in Java that filtered out some XML elements. It still required a valid subscription to the podcast.

Extras worth mentioning⌗

Neovim as main editor at work!⌗

Every third month we have “innovation week” which means that we are free to work on non-sprint stuff. I had heard about the great progress that Neovim + LSP + Treesitter had done, and I was working remote from Sicily, so I decided to try and set up Neovim for Java development. I spent about two days to get a reasonable setup going. I have kept using Neovim as my primary editor since then. Using Neovim as an alternative to IntelliJ also deserves its own blog post.

Mastodon⌗

I’ve been lurking at ioc.exchange for more than a year, but after the Twitter meltdown I decided to give it a real chance. I wrote an #introduction and made my profile look a bit prettier, and started interacting with the community. It’s been great. I’ve had awesome discussions and met people in both tech, gaming and photography circles. I wish it would get more traction and be considered more mainstream here in Sweden. Perhaps 2023 is the year of Linux on desktops and Mastodon.

Colemak⌗

I transitioned to Colemak a year ago. It was a rough start but I committed myself to it even though I had physical pain in my stomach trying to calm myself when trying to find the right key. Programming was horribly, horribly slow. Fast forward a year and I’m still slow, around 30 WPM, but I do proper touch typing and I know this is the right path. I also removed many of the keys on my Zsa Moonlander. I think the current count of keys are 38. Some of these I consider luxuries, like the triangular ones, where one launches the app launcher and the other toggles Swedish/US keyboard input. I think this one deserves its own blog post as well.

Goals of 2023⌗

• Ride from Treriksroset to Smygehuk, ie. through all of Sweden.
• More Crossfit. Be able to do five pull-ups.
• Read more, and more consistently. Six books minimum.
• Blog more. Publish at least three articles.
• Contribute to an open source project.
• Pick up analog photography again.