My relaxing summer break is coming to a close, which means I’m days away from returning to work and the world of data protection for 2021.
Last year was a stressful one, and I’ve no reason to believe this year will be any different once I dive back into work. So, I gave myself a complete break from all-things-data-protection from the moment I downed pens on the afternoon of Friday 18 December.
So what does a geek do when they’re deciding to completely eschew their normal geeky activities? Personally, I usually find unwinding after a stressful work period to be quite difficult – and more often than not end up going back to work feeling more stressed than when I left. I was determined this time for it to be different.
Reading
I’m pleased to say I finished Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem series. I’m really glad I read it, and I’d heartily recommend to any science fiction reader to dive into it, but I’ll also say that I doubt I’ll ever read it again. That’s not a comment on the quality – but I definitely prefer my science fiction a little less bleak.
I was going to read Everyday Ethics by Dr Simon Longstaff and The Lost Arabs by Omar Sakr, but by the time I finished Three-Body Problem, I distracted myself with the discovery of the 25th edition of Like People in History by Felice Picano. The timing must be spot-on – the last time I read the book was in 1996 and living in Perth. I’m still making my way back through at the moment, and much as I loved it the first time, I’m definitely getting way more out of it with a late-40s perspective than I did with an early-20s one. I remember picking up Like People in History in a bookstore in Perth, flipping it over to the back, and seeing a recommendation tag of “Like a gay Gone With the Wind!” That almost caused me to put it back down, but on reflection, I get it now, and as I continue to make my way back through it, I’m increasingly of the opinion that it’s a seminal masterpiece in LGBTI literature.
Gaming
I think it’s been more than 3 months now since I’ve played Minecraft, which is an odd continuing break. Instead, I probably spent too much time over the break playing AnimA: The Reign of Darkness on Android. It’s a simple but fun RPG-style game that became a built of a guilty pleasure. And more than once I’d reward myself for a problem solved (see “Geeking”, below) with another level of AnimA.
Watching
Just as the break was starting, we stumbled on Visible: Out on Television, a multi-episode documentary covering the growth of and changing nature of LGBTIQ representation on US television. It’s truly excellent watching – and I’d suggest this: if you’re an LGBTI ally, you probably need to watch it even more than an LGBTI person. For us, it’s history. For allies, it’s understanding. And it’s been lovingly done, even if it’s done 100% blinkered towards US-TV only. (To the point where you’d honestly think Queer as Folk was a US invention.)
Of course, watching also included Star Trek Discovery and The Expanse.
Geeking
Ah, now this was where I perhaps had the most fun during my break. I went into the break feeling slightly peeved with the state of bookmark management. Bookmark managers tend to come in one of three flavours: OS specific, browser-specific, or platform-specific. That all sounds reasonable unless you’re a complete geek like myself who uses multiple operating systems, multiple browsers, and multiple platforms.
So the geeky solution was to dust off my programming skills.
Years ago I wrote a fairly comprehensive Perl-based Web front-end for PostgreSQL databases. It used a back-end configuration file and a series of generic modules to rapidly deploy an interface for a database. In fact, I used it quite successfully as a project tracking system for a graphic design agency, and a case management and time tracking system for the system integrator I worked for in the early 00s. At one point I even dreamt of pivoting my career to a developer/business owner one selling this front-end, but I ended up burning myself out on other coding activities in the latter half of the 00s.
Fast forward to December 19 2020, and I found myself once again annoyed at the state of bookmark managers. While the Perl code would have been adaptable, it was pre-HTML5 and barely had a sniff of CSS, so I thought it an apt time to pick up some CSS and PHP skills.
First thoughts: PHP is at times a maddening language for someone who has been working with Perl for 25+ years. There are elements that are so close to Perl you can practically smell it, and I found half of my debugging came down to staring at an issue for half an hour before the epiphany: oooh I see the problem now, I’m using Perl syntax there.
Second thoughts: CSS remains a crap-fest when it comes to design. No wonder serious print designers find CSS and website design so tediously frustrating, no matter how good the tools are.
But, within a day or so I had my database and responsive interface up and running. Above is a quick screen recording of me accessing it via an Android phone – with CSS responsive design in play, the desktop experience is a broader one.
I can see this being a pocket project for a while to come, and I’ve already got a Trello board full of TODOs and so on. But, the real fun thing was when my husband spotted it and asked if he could use it. So, an hour or two of futzing around after gave me a multi-user version of the application and a whole lot more personal satisfaction.
It’s funny – I spent all of last year lamenting that everyone else seemed to be finding hobbies during the pandemic and I couldn’t think of a single hobby I wanted to play around with. In the spirit of you need to find your muse though, an annoyance with browser bookmark management gave an old hobby back to me: development.
And looking forward, I’m thinking that Perl-based front-end might be rewritten in PHP this year. (Hopefully requiring less than the 100,000+ lines of code it ran to last time.)
2021, or 2020-won?
I admit, I went into the end of the year feeling somewhat burnt out. To that end I’ve ignored all things data protection for my break, and will continue to do so until 6am Monday morning when I log back into work.
And I think because of that, I can safely declare this year to be 2021, not 2020-won.
Happy new year,