Good things come to an end

Good morning, it’s been a while. 2023 has felt like a rather long year for me, and as it comes to an end, so do two of my longest-standing projects.

sway-borders is a fork I started in August of 2020 which attempted to implement more customizable, rounded borders for the Sway compositor. It succeeded in doing so in a customizable but hacky way by letting the user specify 8 images which would be overlaid and stretched across the corner and edges of windows or containers. I, and many others, used it until sometime around March 2023. It was the first project of mine that has had any kind of sizable userbase. Today, it is still the only such project. And soon, it will be archived.

I do not build projects with the intention of them becoming popular, but rather to learn and share information to the world. I definitely enjoyed the fact that sway-borders was popular, though; making something that I know other people find useful is rewarding, particularly — and maybe exclusively — when the community is friendly and supportive. It also netted me a very kind, roughly $50.00 CAD donation. However, at the time, I also felt rushed to get it out for the fear of someone else making a fork instead. I felt pressured to improve it and made hollow promises to continue work on it at some point. I’m not sure why I felt this way, because at least in the present I openly support alternatives like swayfx. I never did end up improving it, only managing to keep it up to date with upstream, until I stopped using it myself when I went back to the dull rectangular borders of upstream Sway.

Ultimately, I think I lack the necessary experience in C and graphics programming, and the drive to change that in the present, to make it really good. So, soon, I will archive the repository on GitHub and remove the long broken sway-borders-git package from the AUR. It was a fun project while it lasted and I learned a lot about Wayland and Arch in the process. It was also the entrypoint to many communities I remain an active member of to this day.

mordor is the hostname of my first virtual private server created at 00:30 UTC on June 10th, 2019. On it I hosted my first websites, ran a VPN server, IRC bouncer, and my own email server, played around with containers, made my first backups, and completed school assignments. It also started my tradition of naming machines after locations of Middle-earth. As I write this, it has an uptime of 1137 days, and I’m repeatedly marvelled by the fact that its Debian 10 operating system still isn’t running malware. My use and experience with it is directly or indirectly responsible for positions at school clubs, my freelance web development business, my paid and unpaid co-op positions, and my undergraduate status at the university.

mordor has already celebrated the new year, but it won’t make it far beyond that. I’ve moved almost everything off to a couple of other servers that are much better organized. I will be sad running the last poweroff, and for the record: yes it’s weird and nerdy to reminiss over and subtly personify a couple of virtual cores, RAM, and an SSD in a Toronto datacenter, but this is my blog and I write what I want on it. Goodnight good server, you’ve done us all well.

Finally, this blog post ostensibly marks the last writing I will do this year.

Goodbye 2023; see you soon 2024.