When I remember, I like to do a bit of a year-in-review post, which generally revolves around my open-source work. For that purpose, I realized that my GitHub commit graph can set the stage nicely:

Apparently, April and October were busy months for the client work I do that isn't on github.com.

Projects

XPages JEE Support

My biggest project for the year was definitely the XPages Jakarta EE Support project. At the end of last year, I made the move to Jakarta EE 9 as the baseline, with its associated package-name switch from javax.* to jakarta.*. This move really let the project flourish. Since I'm no longer regularly fighting with the ancient versions of JEE specs that ship as part of the XPages stack, I've been able to add a bunch of new features, such as JSF, Concurrency, Transactions, and improved Servlets. I've also been able to make huge strides on the Jakarta NoSQL support, adding the necessary evil of view-based operations and provisional drivers for the AppDev Pack and Keep.

Though that project is starting to get very constrained by Jakarta EE 10's move to Java 11 as a base requirement, there's still a lot of work I can do with the EE 9 specs. I have some larger ideas in mind and I have a stack of issues in the list of various sizes to look at. This project is the baseline for one of my larger client projects, and it's my current best idea for what Java development with Domino should look like.

NSF ODP

Next up would probably be my workhorse, the NSF ODP Tooling. Though I put out a good few releases this year, they've primarily been about compatibility with new Eclipse and macOS releases. macOS compilation in particular is a real bugbear: the OS's tightening restrictions and Notes's varying ways of adapting to them have made it a real moving target.

I've had it in my mind for a while now to add a specific Docker-based compilation option. It's always been possible to run the compilation inside Docker by building your own container and using the tooling within it, but it'd be useful to have that as a standardized thing controlled by the Maven plugin. That way, you'd still do the normal Maven commands for your environment and, if configured, it would build an image internally based on the Domino container image and do the build in there. That should be more reliable, particularly for macOS and Windows, but I'll have some fiddly details to iron out. Should be doable, though - it's on my hopeful list for this year.

Domino Open Liberty Runtime

The Open Liberty Runtime project is in a weird spot. It's been progressing in fits and spurts, and it's gradually moving towards a good future. My general notion for it is to make it an easier way to run tasks attached to a Domino server. So far, those "tasks" have been specifically Liberty running webapps, but the core concept is just that it's managing executables that can cooperate with the Domino server. I'd like to make this more generic, smoothing the process of running other Java-based tasks with an arbitrary JVM and potentially managing non-Java executables as well. There have been some rocky days in there dealing with the changing landscape for how open-source JVM builds are located and deployed, but the growth of the Adoptium Marketplace and its stable API looks to have settled things down for me.

Other Stuff

Beyond specific projects, I can think of a few notable public things for me this past year.

Local Library Work

Since shortly after I moved to my current house, I've been involved with the Friends of the Library group for the local branch of our library system. This past year, I also joined the overall board for the system, as its bylaws reserve a seat for a member of each of the Friends groups. This has been interesting, since, while it's still a comparatively-low-key thing, it's a bit more structured of a group than other organizations I've been involved with. It's also been a good way to keep a bit more informed about local politics without actually getting into local politics.

Also, we just officially went fine-free today, which is neat. That's one of those things where you originally think that fines are essentially required, but statistics show that they're effectively just a tax on poor kids and systems are better off dropping basic fines. I'm pretty pleased with the move.

Mastodon

I remain thoroughly pleased with my mostly-move to Mastodon. I still check Twitter, but I've been cutting down on follows over there, mostly from service accounts and those who have also made the switch. It feels like a loose tooth now, and is mostly waiting for replacement by a good Mac client. I got in the Ivory beta a while back, and slotted that right in place where Tweetbot used to be on my phone.

With any luck, Twitter will continue to be afflicted by catastrophe after catastrophe and more people will make the jump. If you haven't yet, I certainly suggest you give it a shot. I like Action Retro's video for a primer.

GitHub Sponsors

A few months ago, I set up a GitHub Sponsors profile. I figure this may be a good way to handle some cases where something I'm doing doesn't rise to the level of a whole contract or to essentially "vote" in favor of me doing the sort of open-source work I do. Admittedly, I expect I'll keep doing that regardless, but the contributions I've received so far are very gratifying.

Resolutions

I haven't been the sort of person to do New Year's Resolutions as such, but I still figure it's a nice time of year to make general plans and goals for the year. For example, I found that my gaming habits got into a bit of a rut last year - lots of Stardew Valley and Terraria, and fewer games that I haven't already played to death. I've got a growing stack of acclaimed games to play, and I'd like to work down the list, even when the games are older than dirt. Same goes for reading: considering I'm on the board of the library system, I sure don't do a lot of book reading lately. I should fix that!

Beyond that, we'll see. There are some neat things going on at OpenNTF that could set the tone for the year - in the short term, we're planning on running some "repair caf?s" this month as a way to do another kind of community interaction. I wouldn't mind doing that sort of thing more often; I've done a few "let's talk about Java" calls in the past and always enjoy them. I hope those take off enough for us to do them regularly.

In any event: Happy New Year!