Almost twenty years

I just migrated this website to a new server and upgraded it to the latest version of Drupal, which unfortunately was a bit painful. Anyway, I realized that it’s almost 20 years since I created the mimec.org website in its current form; it already went through several upgrades and cosmetic overhauls, but most of its content and structure remains unchanged.

I must admit that for the last few years not much has happened on this website and the other websites related to my open-source project and most of the time I just spent trying to fight spam. In the end I decided to disable user registrations entirely and switch all forums to read-only mode, for archival purposes. I mean, let’s admit it, a custom forum on a website is so boomer… All my projects are on GitHub anyway, and they have issue trackers which can be used to submit bugs or ask questions.

In the last years I published some articles on Medium, with mixed results; most of the time I managed to at least break even, i.e. Medium paid me back my $5 that I spend on my subscription, but unfortunately it hasn’t avoided the inevitable entshittification which happens sooner or later to every major platform on the internet, so I finally gave up. Writing good quality technical articles takes a lot of time and effort, and if they can’t compete with clickbait and AI generated content, then what’s the point?

Instead, I recently started setting sudoku puzzles and publishing them on logic-masters.de under the nickname, you guessed it, mimec. I must admit that it’s much more fun and for the nearest future and can’t see how any AI could beat a human in making creative logic puzzles. (Of course, I’m not talking here about the kind of computer generated sudokus which have existed in newspapers for 20 years.)

I haven’t published a new version of any of my open-source projects for a long time, but it doesn’t mean in any way that they’re “dead”. In fact, I’m using both Saladin and WebIssues practically every day. Honestly, I don’t feel that any of them is missing any important features. Luckily, I’m in such position that I don’t have to compete with anyone, so I don’t have to keep releasing new versions just for the sake of doing it, which means that, sorry, I won’t be adding an AI chatbot to any of those programs anytime soon.

It doesn’t mean that I don’t write any open-source projects anymore, in fact there are quite a few of them on GitHub, but most of them are just various tools and utilities that I use internally in some of my work-related projects. Also, last year I realized that I haven’t written any JavaScript front-end framework yet, so I decided to fill that gap, and I created Leaner.js.

It’s hard to say what will happen next. The only thing that I’m sure about is that this year is going to be quite interesting...