2025 Plan: Finish What Matters
2024 was not planned, yet a surprising amount got shipped. The lesson for this year is simple. A little structure will help finish more of the things that already have momentum.
What actually shipped in 2024
Code activity
The contribution graph tells the story. It also shows when GitHub work commits joined the party. I generated the chart with the excellent GitHub Contributions Chart Generator.
Night Sky Pi hit 2.0
Night Sky Pi reached 2.0.0. Version 1.0 took ages because of feature creep. Version 2 focused on packaging and installability. The project moved to Poetry and is now on PyPI, which means pip install night-sky-pi instead of clone and pray.
Notifications with ntfy
The sidecar project NSP NTFY turns Night Sky Pi MQTT events into push notifications via ntfy.sh. It works and needs a tidy up. Next steps are switching it to Poetry, publishing to PyPI, and making it more general so it can handle other MQTT sources.
The Harlow Bindicator
The Harlow Bindicator went from overcomplicated to practical. Early versions leaned on MQTT, Node-RED, and a third party SMS service. The final version uses ntfy for reminders, publishes as a CLI, and ships via PyPI. It has been hands off for months.
Smigle Lite for this site
The blog runs on a fork of the Smigle Hugo theme called Smigle Lite. Unused features were removed, styling simplified, and small SEO bits added.
The focused list for 2025
NSP Data Sender
Night Sky Pi needs a reliable way to move data off device. The goal is to send captures to S3, mirror to the NAS, optionally support FTP, and only delete local files once safe copies exist.
Cbujo
Cbujo is a command line take on bullet journaling. There is a placeholder 0.0.1 on PyPI. Plans include a clean Click CLI, sensible storage, simple commands, and export options. It is a good excuse to sharpen Python CLI habits that also help at work.
Metmesh
Metmesh aims to pull weather data from APIs, services, and local sensors, then normalise and store it for analysis. Version 1 targets core weather metrics, a proper database, hourly and daily summaries, location grouping, and a small API.
Making the workspace less bleak
The office works, but it is not inspiring.
Plans for 2025:
- Cover some brick with wood panels
- Add colour and reduce the clinical white
- Put down flooring that does not fight the chair wheels
- Replace the harsh fluorescent lighting
Getting organised
Time is lost hunting for tools and cables. The plan is to take inventory, create a simple categorisation that sticks, let go of the just in case pile, and set the desk to be five minutes from idea to action.
Taming the Pi setup
The Pi cluster on IKEA Skadis uses PoE hats that are too loud for calls. The plan is a small rack, standard power supplies, better cable management, and quieter cooling.
Writing with intent
The target is quality over quantity. That means proper docs for projects, tutorials for gaps that tripped me up, and quick write ups of technical fixes while they are fresh. The minimum bar is one substantial post per quarter with documentation for each major project.
By the end of the year, success looks like three finished projects, a cleaner office, and less context switching.
Thanks for reading. If you have a neat approach for keeping hobby projects focused without killing the fun, send it over.