My 2024 wishes - part 1

I have quite a lot of wishes for 2024, and in this post I’ll put the most important ones to me right now and in an update early next year I’ll add some of the others too.

Not to be homeless

See this post for more details because this impacts everything else for the year ahead like my health, finances and also prospects of getting back into properly enjoying life again & contributing to society as much as I used to do & even more so as this stops me from being able to start & run business/es without making use of a PO BOX or other holding addresses, which I may still make use of.

Health to improve

Both my physical and mental health over years have taken a bit of a battering, and becoming homeless certainly hasn’t helped either.

See & help my family, friends & communities as much as I used to

This requires me having a car, as being fully reliant on public transport/taxis isn’t economical or practical with how scattered my family, friends & communities are across the UK & beyond.

This also means seeing many people that I haven’t seen in years, whether in person or via video calls, but ideally in person.

Find the right job for me

This most likely is going to be that I become self employed, though I’d love to join the PowerShell Team as a permanent member of the team. I know this is really unlikely to happen, though if it did I know that I would be a great asset to the team, however I think in 2024 I will end up working more closely with the team whether or not I end up joining them or not.

Otherwise I’d love to re-join the IT Dept at University of Manchester, whether as a permanent employee or as a contractor as I actually really regret having taken voluntary severance from there back in 2015, however at the time it was not only the right thing for me but also for others that were on the team too, you could in some ways say that I “took one for the team” by taking voluntary severance. It also enabled me to do lots of the kickstarting of the in person element of The UK PowerShell Community so it was a blessing in disguise.

There are other teams that I’d like to re-join including those at Black Marble, or Dotdigital, however I know that’s probably not going to happen, I would in future like to at least speak with them again if at all possible.

Start my own Businesses

This requires me securing some serious funding and proper support to ensure that they don’t fail & yes I do have in my mind a plan for each one of them that I am working on.

• For this I intend to hire multiple staff (hence the need for funding), as it’s always more fun having more than one person in your band/s who all have the opportunity to provide input on future direction, and for their input to be taken seriously.
• Also these will have community give back requirements built into them, as to share profits and be more ethical going forward, like supporting some of the next 2.

Start a Charity

I think that this is the right way forward to build out Mhasl.me / Mental Health Affects Someone Like Me and is something I have been thinking about for the last 10 months or so. More on this another time.

Start a Community Interest Company

This is the right way forward to build out The UK PowerShell Community going into the future & honestly is something that I should have done years ago and had previously looked into it. More on this another time.

Keep on learning

This is a given really but I have many things that I want to learn both in Tech & outside of Tech

Tech

C#

This’ll help me in improving PowerShell as well as other projects that I have in mind for the future. Perhaps a re-platforming of the blogs from Hugo is on the cards for this as I don’t like Go or some of the ways that sites and themes are built for it. But that’s lots of work and may be a multi year process.

F#

I keep saying this is another language that I’d like to learn as I think that there is a possibility to rewrite parts of PowerShell in F# but that’s a really big piece of work and is something that I’d like to see some more discussion around.

Python

This is less for me right now as I am much more focused on .NET languages and more so that I can support my son who seems to be a whizzkid and doing well in school and learning & using Python, but also it will be of great use to me in some areas particularly in data and research work going into the later years of my life.

Rust

As DSC is being written in Rust it makes sense for me to follow along and learn more of this language.

Terraform

So many jobs list terraform as a required skill and up till now I personally haven’t had a need for it as I can do what it does in PowerShell, or Bicep & as I don’t really want to work with AWS or GCP it hasn’t really made sense to me to learn these for my own uses.

Non Tech

I not long ago picked up the guitar again for the first time in years and have really enjoyed playing again, so I want to spend time learning it better. This was something that when I was a teenager I picked up but depression along with many other things had hindered my growth in this skill.

I also want to play the drums, keyboard & violin at some point in my future & know plenty of people that I can reach out to for lessons across the UK if/when I get the chance to.

I also want to properly learn how to mix so at some point I’ll be getting myself some decks & luckily I have lots of good friends who know what they are doing there that I know will help me with this too.

Play more games

Snooker, Call of Duty, Guitar Hero and lots lots more

Stabilise my future

I had a plan going into being 35 (which isn’t till 2025), which was thrown under the bus because of everything that has happened these last few years, especially after Covid and then losing my dad to cancer, I was burnt out and needed a break from working life, which I have attempted to get back into, but had some unfortunate experiences along the way.

This was brought in part to the immense changes to how my role at Black Marble was during the pandemic, compared to how it was prior, which took me longer to be comfortable with, mostly due to living away from friends & family and was very isolated in a flat I hated living in. This knocked my mental health for six, and quite frankly it’s due to sheer determination & knowing a few things about psychopharmacology, mental health, particularly depression and how to combat suicidal thoughts, and doing what was necessary for me to survive, so that I could one day again see both my son and my daughter as well as others in my family as well as all of my friends and at the time colleagues.

I’m not happy that there were plenty of times throughout 2020-2023 where I was borderline suicidal, though I’ve battled that demon since I was 13, with only actually having 2 poor attempts in my teens and those moments are now always really short lived.

Not get writers block

I have lots of content planned, just it is being in the right zone & finding the time & the right words for all that content to come out.

• Keep posting here and on Mhasl.me / Mental Health Affects Someone Like Me & eventually on the PowerShell Community blog
• Build more PowerShell Sessions
  • I have plenty of these planned, some are rehashes of previous sessions & others are completely new. I’ve already submitted some of these to PSConfEU & PSDayCH
• Build more Azure Sessions
  • This realistically requires me having an Azure sponsorship (like when I was an MVP) to be able to do so, because otherwise it’s far too costly for me to do so otherwise.
• Build more GitHub Sessions
  • Particularly around how best to make use of GitHub from my experience
• Build more Azure DevOps Sessions
  • Particularly around how best to make use of Azure DevOps from my experience
• Build more Personal Productivity Sessions
  • Particularly around how best to make use of the technology that is available to us that I have been using over the years
• I plan to write or better yet, work with others and co-author a book on the history of the PowerShell Communities up until say the end of 2024, much like Don Jones did with Shell of an Idea kick start this late 2024 with an aspirational plan to release either in 2025/2026.

Tech Refresh

• New Laptop
  • My current one has done me well enough since 2019, however it has no working battery, so isn’t really a laptop anymore and the keyboard does not always map to the keystrokes I am making unless I use an external one, see Keys left for more info on why this is perhaps a tad annoying
    • It seems no longer possible to get replacement parts for this one, so it will end up basically being a backup device in future.
• Desktop/Workstation
  • To do more PowerShell DSC particularly on lab based development
  • Build a number of test environments
  • Better for Gaming and Streaming which I want to do more in future around streaming
  • Same for video editing
• Phone Upgrade
  • Though I don’t yet know what I want to upgrade to next as my OnePlus 7T Pro has done me well & I like the pop-out front facing camera, so this may not be something that happens, we will have to see.

People to talk more

People to talk to me and also listen to me. Because I love listening & talking to people, especially a good number of people that I haven’t spoken with in a long time who I really want to speak with again more regularly.

But generally people need to talk more as it’s beneficial for our mental health, as is writing too!

My health to get better (which I think it is on the course to do so)

Better Open Source Funding

Funding to come from businesses and via grants from governments, to enable individuals to not only be an open source developer, but to be able to live comfortably in doing so by being self employed.

Ideally every G7 Nation should have an open source developer fund that individuals (like myself) can apply for that can show that they are working with some of that countries list of critical software which is open source.

If this happens then this can help people like me who could be doing more than they already are, do so much more as this will help reduce some of the financial stresses that they have, whilst also providing a financial incentive for them to do more and keep on doing more & is both morally and ethically the right thing for governments to do going forward.

My 2024 wishes - part 2

To come early 2024 as the above are the most important ones for me are listed above.

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