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+---
+date: 2026-01-07
+title: Looking Back at 2025
+tags:
+- Personal
+---
+
+I enjoyed making a post last year to reflect upon what's keeping me busy, or
+what caused me to not be busy, so I was thinking to do it again! If you're
+reading this, it turns out I went through with it.
+
+In general, the past year has been much better to me than the one before, at
+least on an emotional level. The relationship has progressed into becoming an
+engagement, and the work I put into my home in 2024 has paid off. I've had more
+time and energy to spend on tech projects, and so I did.
+
+I've started using a kanban board[^1] for personal projects, so I can get a more
+clear overview on what I need to do, and in some cases, what order to do them
+in. This has helped me a lot in keeping my priorities in check, and to get
+potential new ideas of my mind by writing them down so I can focus on more
+useful things first. There's also some positive reinforcement by checking the
+board once a week and seeing how much has been accomplished.
+
+## My Homelab
+
+The biggest project I've been working on is a mix of Ansible and Terraform, to
+maintain my personal cluster[^2]. While I used to use
+[Bashtard](https://www.tyil.nl/projects/bashtard/releases/) for this, as noted
+in an older blog post, I've reconsidered this approach. I made Bashtard as an
+"how hard can it be" kind of project, and the result is that its not necesarily
+_hard_ to make your own configuration management system. It is, however, very
+time consuming. Ansible comes with most of the stuff I want out of the box. I do
+dislike that I cannot deep merge configuration files, but that can be solved by
+just making less pretty configuration keys.
+
+Ansible manages all my physical machines, servers, workstations, laptops, HTPCs.
+On a subset on machines it will also configure Kubernetes, specifically,
+[k3s](https://k3s.io/). The Kubernetes deployments in turn are managed by
+[OpenTofu](https://opentofu.org/). I hope to make a future blog post soon-ish
+going into more detail on how and why I did the Terraform resources in the way I
+did. For now, just accept that its been working reasonably well.
+
+## DashLab
+
+Another project I've had fun with was
+[DashLab](https://www.tyil.nl/projects/dashlab/releases/), a dashboard for
+homelabs, written in Golang. I don't do much general programming anymore, as I
+don't really feel in touch with most languages anymore. Perl is always good, but
+it does appear to be thoroughly disliked by "modern" developers. Raku is still
+slow. Rust is more a cult than a programming language community, and I've had
+enough interaction with cults in my life. Python I sadly have to use for work,
+but it is hard to find a worse-designed language these days.
+
+Go is not perfect either; it has strong ties with Google, and I strongly dislike
+having to jump through hoops to keep the Google shitware out of my way[^3].
+`gccgo` exists, but it lacks behind so far that it is not practically usable for
+me right now.
+
+That said, the language _itself_ is clean, it compiles very quickly, and the
+resource usage of running programs seems to be more than acceptable. Its easy to
+pick up, and feature-rich enough to write out decent looking code.
+
+## Projects for This Year
+
+Of course, the new year comes with its own projects. Blogging more about my
+homelab set up is a part of it, but I want to do more than just write about
+things I've already done.
+
+### Trying out Wayland Yet Again
+
+As I do each year, I do want to revisit Wayland yet again. Hyprland was starting
+to get very acceptable last year, and I hear/read it's only getting better.
+Maybe 2026 will finally be the year of a stable Wayland setup with a tiling WM!
+
+### Mapping Surveillance in OSM
+
+A more interesting project, to me at least, is that I've set out to map
+surveillance cameras in the city I live in. After being [inspired by a Dutch
+news
+article](https://woestegrond.org/veiligheid/bespied-door-de-videodeurbel-viola-maakt-zich-zorgen-om-de-privecameras-in-haar-wijk/),
+I was wondering how my own neighbourhood was doing on surveillance, but there
+was no data in my entire city. Since anyone can contribute to OSM, I thought
+to myself I might as well be the one doing it. It gets me out of the house a bit
+more, and incentives me to see more of the city I otherwise would ignore. I'm
+not sure if I'll continue with the _entire_ city, but I would like to at least
+do a large part of it.
+
+### Releasing Terraform Modules
+
+With the work I've been doing on my homelab, I've also created a few Terraform
+modules which I use in my own setup. They are set up to make certain repetitive
+tasks easier, for me at least. They've been used liberally in my own setup, and
+I am starting to get confident that they are becoming rather stable. I still
+need to document them properly, and figure out if there's some easy means of
+sharing them in the Terraform/OpenTofu community that doesn't require
+registering on a proprietary platform. If there isn't, then that's fine too and
+I'll just release them as simple git repositories.
+
+## Wrapping Up
+
+As noted before, I'm entering this new year with a positive attitude, and I hope
+it will keep up. I'm already pretty happy with TyilNET in its current state,
+everything I want running is running just fine, and deploying new applications
+is a breeze under the current setup. I'm looking forward to blogging more about
+it, and maybe write some new software now that it's so easy to get it running
+the way I want it.
+
+
+[^1]: I'm using the kanban board plugin for Nextcloud, as I'm already running
+      Nextcloud anyway.
+[^2]: I've dubbed my homelab setup "TyilNET".
+[^3]: You can disable Google's anti-features by [setting environment
+      variables](https://git.tyil.nl/dotfiles/tree/.config/shell/env#n63).