I just want this post to be a short documentation of my current thoughts and perspectives as we rush towards 2024. As I’m writing this, 2024 is just a few hours away. Can’t believe that it’s been four years since 2020 feels like yesterday and the fact that the year 2040 is nearer than the year 2000 the year of my birth.

I like to try out new things and experiment with my systems quite a lot, and because of that, sometimes things break or don’t quite work as expected. Sometimes it’s a compatibility issue or because I messed up something. And that has sometimes cost me a lot of unnecessary effort and time.

I mostly never have to worry about most of my data, as I keep backups for most of it, or they are on cloud storage that I keep in sync with my local storage. It’s the state of my system that sometimes throws me off-guard, like, for instance, when I won’t be able to boot because my new arch update had an issue with my bootloader, or sometimes a software update breaks in some unexpected way and I have to figure out what’s wrong and fix it. So I like to keep a backup of my system state so that I can restore it to a working state if something goes wrong, and I need it to work as soon as possible. And that backup is mostly a disk image of my system with minimal things installed and configured. For that, up until now I’ve used g-parted and dd for the most part, which are fairly basic and dumb utilities and work great. There are other, more advanced solutions out there, like Timeshift and Snapper, but they require a lot more setup and some insight into filesystems. For the most part, in my use case, I just want my system back up and running if I happen to break it. For the most part, I don’t require point-in-time backups or incremental backups.

I distro-hop quite a lot, sometimes to check out the new features of a distro and get a little feel for it, other times just to check the compatibility of different pieces of software. For these reasons, I might stay with a distribution for a long period of time or just for a few things here and there, but no matter the reason, I need to create a bootable media from the respected ISO files and burn them to a USB and so on, and I have to do it every time I want to change the distro for some reason I need a bootable media.

It’s been more than a year since I’ve started working with typescript and the Node ecosystem, and throughout I have not written a single line of frontend code, Which I think is strange for some folks since I get asked about most things related to frontend, and they are surprised when I say I don’t know ReAcT.

So I decided to change that and take a look at the frontend world. To be honest, I’m not particularly interested in frontend and cosmetic stuff, but I do genuinely appreciate a good user experience and the thought process and craftsmanship that goes into making one. And what’s a better way to understand something than to get your hands dirty with it?