Happy 2019 readers! This blog has been on something of a hiatus for the last two years and I would like to rectify that in the coming year.

2018 was a time of some rather big changes for me. At the end of 2017, I moved in with my boyfriend. We fell into a rather comfortable routine. My job allowed me enough down time to work on side projects, such as my game development blog and a new third-party framework.

As 2018 progressed, I left that job and began a consulting contract. I had a year to complete the contract and I was slightly burned out, so I worked that part time. This allowed me to continue to work on the third party framework, which I had hoped to complete the port of by the end of the year.

But, life gets in the way.

In March my loving boyfriend asked me to marry him. I joyfully accepted and we set a wedding date for September. I had already planned out what we were going to do. The wedding would be quite small. I figured that it wouldn’t disturb our routine that much and I could continue work on my side projects.

Let’s just say this did not go to plan…

Beyond the actual wedding, there were a lot of things that needed to be taken care of. There was paperwork and deadlines. I had to go through various processes to get my name changed. There were dress fittings and meetings with the minister. All of my mental energy that I had been using for my side projects went into the wedding/marriage.

I think I have written on here before about the depression I suffered after my first marriage officially fell apart. I thought when I got my ex-husband out of my house that all of my mental energy would be free to work on projects and do things I care about.

I didn’t realize that the huge change in going from being married to being single would be a tremendous shock to my system. I had never paid taxes before. I hadn’t paid the water bill before. I had no idea what any of my expenses were because I never saw them before. I now had to handle those things and budget for them and figure out how to feed myself. This threw me into a shock and it took a few years to shake off.

Even though the wedding was a nice disruption to my routine, it was still a disruption. I had a lot of trouble getting motivated or focused on my side projects because I kept worrying about something I needed to do for the wedding. I knew it would be over soon and when it was that we could get back to our routine and I could continue with my projects.

Again, that turned out not to be the case.

When I moved in with my husband, I wasn’t really comfortable with the house. It was his house and even though I gradually made it feel like our home, there were some issues with it. I didn’t have a room that worked well as a home office. I converted a bedroom to my office, but it was still a bedroom. It had closets and was in an upstairs corner of the house. We couldn’t open our window shades because the houses next door were within touching distance and we didn’t want people to look in. We had basically no yard, so that was hard on the dogs.

Instead of weekends spent lovingly working on game and graphics projects, we attended open houses and got our hopes up on homes that didn’t pan out. It was mentally and emotionally exhausting.

We found a lovely new place that suited most of our needs perfectly. The ones it didn’t were improvements we could implement as opposed to ones that could not be changed, like the size of the lot and the nearness of the neighbors.

So instead of spending nights and weekends working on projects, we spent that time cleaning our house to put up for sale. After the sale, we spent that time cleaning and packing for our move.

For about two months it was close to impossible to work on anything I didn’t absolutely have to because of the sheer mental exhaustion of just planning out everything that needed to be done before we could move. I couldn’t even get involved in my usual cooking projects because I knew that I should be packing up the kitchen for the move and it made no sense to buy a bunch of food that would need to be moved from one place to another.

Around the time we started putting the house up for sale, my consulting gig got a bit more serious. I discovered there were a bunch of required features I had been unaware of and the client wanted the project completed by the end of the year. I started working on that full time and had literally no time for anything else I wanted to work on. The third party framework has languished for months and people are beginning to ask if it will ever be completed.

Three days after Christmas we moved out of our old house and into the new one. It was an exhausting day, but we made it work. We’re still surrounded by boxes and I still have trouble finding clean underwear in the mornings, but we’ve weathered the worst of it and we’re beginning to take stock of where to go from here.

I have a few goals I would like to accomplish in the first half of 2019:

• Make GPUImage 3 have feature parity with GPUImage 1. I feel badly about not updating the framework for so long and I want people to feel comfortable knowing the framework isn’t abandoned before integrating it into their projects.
• Blogging. I have let all of my blogs languish because I have been too overwhelmed to think about what to write. I would like to go back to blogging about graphics and getting more comfortable with Metal in general.

It’s not a first half of 2019 goal, but I have the same goal for 2019 that I have every year: Ship an app. I have shipped books and held interesting jobs, but I have not shipped an app of my own. Technically the consulting project I am doing is an app that will ship that I essentially wrote on my own, but it’s not mine. I learned a lot from the experience of building that app and now I want to make one of my own and be my own client. I have not decided if it will be an iOS native app or a project created in Unity.

I have a few possible projects on the horizon that have not been committed to yet, so I won’t mention them here.

I know that there is something of a backlash against New Year’s resolutions. Most revolve around losing weight and going to the gym, which is hard to sustain. I think it’s nice to have a delineating beginning to a span of time where you can take stock of things and say “I don’t like how things are right now and I want to change them.”

I love my husband and I love our new home. I would not change that for the world. But right now I need a mental change. I am tired of my side projects being packing my life to move from one place to another. I miss having a thing I am making for myself that I will feel proud of. I keep worrying I will never get back to that again. I want my own life. I want my own projects. I want to look at things I have produced and feel pride that I did something this year that I couldn’t do last year.

Professionally I feel like 2018 was a wash. I didn’t accomplish anything I wanted to. I don’t feel I progressed in a meaningful way. I guess I have mostly completed an app by myself that should ship, but that doesn’t feel like progress to me. I want to learn from these experiences so that I can use my time better this year on things I care about.

I don’t think we’re going to have a wedding or a move this time around.