Hey, friend!Welp, I kinda didn't expect December to come this fast. We've been talking about 2020 being the longest year ever, and yet... it's just about done. Obviously many of us wished for better by the end of this year. My kids are still learning at home and they miss their friends at school and their relatives in Michigan and Miami deeply. I'm still juggling being a half-time full-time dad/teacher, and then the other half of the time fitting in a full work week. So many of my friends and family have gotten sick or had friends get sick or worse. But, many things are good, for me and for many of us. I celebrate that I've had the opportunity to start learning woodworking and how to fix up houses, that I was able to be in a healthy enough financial state to purchase a dream of a truck last week, that my kids are healthy and they still have friends in the neighborhood to play with... plus they regularly kick their dad's butt at soccer or Beyblades or bike races or whatever else. So, I'm grateful. I hope you have people and things close enough to your life that are good to and for you, even if that may be in the midst of difficulty and turmoil. And whether you celebrate Christmas or any other end-of-year holidays, I hope you are not alone, whatever that means to you. I hope you have friends or family near you, or find friendship in others near you or find other forms of "nearness" with your friends and family, even if that's just Zoom. I hope you end this year on a high point. What else has been happening? A few quick updates: Takeout More new work on Takeout! We're hoping to make it work for non-PHP developers and for new PHP folks who may forego setting up PHP on their local machines entirely, so Jose and I have begun the process of re-writing it from scratch in Node. We both have young kids so there's not a ton of free time, but we're making slow progress! BlackShopFriday Tighten joined other creative and socially connected folks in Chicago to build BlackShopFriday.com, a website dedicated to encouraging folks in Chicagoland to shop at Black-owned businesses on Black Friday and beyond. We worked with a dev firm, Geletka, who handled the frontend, while we built the backend in Laravel and Nova, based on designs from an ad agency. LaravelM1 Apple released their new M1 chip, and many things don't work yet (Docker, Homebrew, etc.) I ordered a cheap M1 Mac Mini to test everything in the Laravel world out on it, and put my results online: https://laravelm1.tighten.co/ Dotfiles I've been maintaining a dotfiles repo that I forked from someone else for years and there's a ton of crap in there I don't need, so I've finally started from scratch in building my own dotfiles. About 2/3rd of the way in I learned there are tools meant to simplify some of the tasks for creating your own, but I held tight to the sunk cost fallacy and just continued on. This new M1 machine will be my testing grounds for whether it's any good, and if I do eventually get it good enough for me, maybe then I'll simplify it and make it useful for others. Maybe. But if you're a dotfiles nerd, check it out in case there might be anything useful in there. What Else? The Laravel Podcast
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That's it for now! Until next time... Your friend, |