What did I do in 2022 and my WishList for 2023

It’s the year of MikroTik and network engineering. So, there is hardly any WordPress stuff in this post.

Hardware

I bought MikroTik hAP AX2 this year, just after its launch. I’d been waiting for it for years. This is my fourth MikroTik product for my R&D. Earlier, I owned two numbers of hAP ac2 and SXT LTE Kit. One hAP AC2 runs on Router OS v6. The other one is on the latest version. Using them to test drive both versions in my Tik lab. Both hAP ac2 are older models with 256MB memory. These days, hAP ac2 comes with just 128MB. Never unheard of such going backward on other hardware such as mobiles.

Open Source Projects

Released three open source repositories this year…

  1. MikroTik LTE Scripts – LTE specific scripts. All testing was done on my lone SXT LTE Kit. Planning to get another LTE device in 2024, specifically with large flash storage. Currently, most offer only 16MB! I don’t think MikroTik would release something more than 16MB in 2023. They are slow to upgrade the hardware.
  2. MikroTik Generic Scripts – Generic scripts that can be used in any MikroTik device. Scripts to check for updates, to take backups, to alert upon anomalies, etc.
  3. Backup to S3 – A backup solution for non-wp sites. Currently, supports Laravel and phpBB.

What about WordPress?

No significant progress! I could only maintain my active plugins in wp.org. I plan to create a new plugin in place of an abandoned one related to Mobile Detect library. Also, there are over 45 draft posts in the back-end. While some of them may not see the light of the day, I wish to publish at least one per month in 2023 (and possibly on the following year too).

Consistency in Learning

If you look at my open source contributions in Github for the year 2022, you can notice that I wasn’t consistent throughout the year, except for the last two months. In 2023, I wish to be consistent in my learning and sharing. Except on weekends and on days of travel, I plan to learn something new and improve something in my open source projects.

Health

A healthy body and mind helps me in improving my skillset too. I didn’t have a healthy lifestyle for decades, even though I didn’t stop learning at any point. I just wasn’t consistent. Only in the last couple of years, I came across TRE(time restricted eating) and its real benefits. While I have been on and off in TRE during the past two years, I wish to be consistent in my TRE schedule. Currently, I skip breakfast and have anything under the earth at other times. I mostly eat between 2pm and 7pm.

Version Control

SVN

WordPress uses SVN internally such as for plugins repository. So, a plugin author must use SVN tools to upload a plugin and update the existing plugin/s in wp.org plugins repository. If you are new to SVN, WordPress docs team has a nice guide to get started with SVN and plugins repository. The best practices section is a gem. It is possible to update WP core using SVN. However, things have been changing. Now, you can host your plugin in Github and push it to wordpress.org plugins repo.

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Looking Back and Looking Forward

Looking back at 2018

With respect to work…

I switched the workplace from Srivilliputhur to Madurai, from BSNL broadband to Airtel broadband, from ADSL to VDSL. I have had a lot of downtimes with BSNL last year. Fortunately, I had JioFi, as a backup, at that time (I was one of the early adapters of Jio 4g in general). However, as more users joined Jio 4g network, the overall speed reduced after each passing month. I used Airtel around 10 years ago (when Airtel had only ADSL), when I was in Madurai. Never had any issue with Airtel.

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I am hiring!

I’ve been a freelancer since 2008. So, it’s been a decade. I am currently looking for a freelance system admin with keen interests in hosting WordPress and PHP sites. Even though, the hosting market, especially the WordPress hosting market, has some big names in it, there are still plenty of problems to solve.

If you have interests in open source technologies and if you have contributed to open source, that’d be awesome. But, it isn’t mandatory. If you know your stuff, or if you can learn stuff, that’s more than enough. At the same time, communication is a big part of our job.

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Please don’t hire me!

Please do not hire me because the cost of living in the country where I live is way cheaper than where you live. Just because the cost of living is lower doesn’t mean you can hire my services at a fraction of rate charged by the tech people from your own country!

Of course, the cost of food and real estate are much cheaper here. The cost of food is rapidly increasing here due to globalization of food industry. However, as my life resolves around IT and products related to IT, the cost of tech products are always higher than whichever country you live in!

To illustrate with an example, iPhone X (64GB model) costs USD 999 in US. Here, the same model costs INR 87400 or approximately USD 1378 upon currency conversion. All hardware products are priced higher due to reasons only known to the retailers. Software products aren’t cheap here either, just because the cost of living is way cheaper!

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Aptitude or apt-get?

It’s 2017. I started using linux in 1999. Yes, I am getting older and older. I have always used apt-get on Debian based servers or distributions. However, in recent times, I am getting more frustrated to use apt-get. To be precise, I may want to install a package. So, I start to type apt-get. Then I may be unsure, if the package by the exact name exists. So, I tend to search the package/s, instead of installing it. Now, I have to use apt-cache to search packages. Sigh!

Note: Now we have apt to solve the above frustration!

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