At the beginning of the year I wrote about 2024 and set out on a 2025 focused on self-care and spending time on some passion projects. A year off the grind was much needed. The first week of the year made me realize how much I had forgotten what a comfortable, unburdened life could be like.
With regard to the 5 passion projects I set out to work on:
- Spanish Ceramic Signs: I remain hopeful that the de Luna family will get the opportunity to restore the ceramic signs in the French Quarter of New Orleans, but the window for that opportunity is closing.
- SlaveCodes.org: I transcribed the 1860 Slave Code of the District of Columbia. It was 110 pages long, and it took quite some time to proofread my transcription before publishing. That said, I didn’t get to translation of the code or do anything else this year as it takes quite a bit out of me (and I think anyone else that would undertake such a task) to grasp the injustices it levied.
- Blacksky: I have contributed quite a bit to Blacksky! Not just contributing to the open source repository, rsky, but also being part of the team that makes up Blacksky. The work I did led to the creation of tektite.cc which allowed folks to move their accounts from Bluesky to Blacksky’s PDS, building the alpha version of the PDS hosting service, moderation tooling for our moderation team, a style guide that helps us use and expand our design language to quickly build websites, a rust crate for Digital Ocean’s API - rsdo, traveling to Seattle to meet Blacksky’s founder, Rudy Fraser, and making connections with a bunch of folks in the ATProto-verse, traveling to Montreal to speak on behalf of Blacksky at the IETF for the atp bof, and much more. But most importantly, working on Blacksky with a wonderful team of folks all of whose passion for building the tooling that serves communities is what brought us together - we all want to be here!
- Slave Voyages: I didn’t get to pursue this idea, but I have a very good sense of how to go about it in Rust and using wasm-bindgen to call d3.js for this. Some of my work with the moderation tooling with Blacksky has led me to do some fancy charting in this manner.
- Linux Key Retention Service: I tried my hand at getting the ball rolling with this idea but came across an issue: most container runtimes run as root by default which is a problem for managing secrets in kernel memory. I do have prototype modules that help with working with sops and ejson with the key retention service, although I haven’t published them anywhere just yet.
What’s in store for me in 2026
- A new gig! I start a new gig at a medical scribe AI company in January. With that said, I’ll be winding down my work at Blacksky. I still intend to support Blacksky throughout the year, primarily through open source development. And yes, I’ll be in Vancouver at the end of March for the Atmosphere ATProto conference. I hope to see you there.
- Publishing the Codigo Carolino for SlaveCodes.org. I plan on publishing the body of slave legislation for the island of Hispaniola - the Codigo Carolino. Alongside that I will be giving some much needed time and energy to the website’s design and styling.
- There is a part of me that wants to formally address the history of the percussion evolution during the Middle Passage and in the African Diaspora in the Americas. It’s been brewing in my head for the last 3 years and I have a lot of notes around it, but I think it’s time to pour my thoughts into a video essay later this year about it.
Let’s Put a Bow On It
2025 was a very much needed year. I got to explore my passions, learn how to manage myself and have a sense and grasp of what stress-free can look like - that’s going to help me regulate myself going forward. I got to make some great friends and meet new people all over the world! And I am looking forward to building on top of that next year!