I just got back from my 7th, and definite last Year End Party with my company. Seeing so many people saying this will their last YEP with the company filled me with so much thoughts I couldn’t sleep, I had to get up at 5AM to write it down.

So where do we start? I guess we’ll take a quick look back at 2024.

2024 was a…pedicular year, for lack of a better word. There was so many new things to learn, and yet far fewer things to do.

I love Cursor as much as the next guy but there’s one thing I don’t like about it. When you install it on Windows or Mac, it will takeover the ‘code’ command in your terminal, which is usually reserved for VSCode (for example if you navigate to a folder and type code . it will open that folder in Cursor instead of VSCode). This is fine if you use Cursor exclusively but if you’re like me who uses Cursor and Cline side by side, then this is especially annoying when you want to launch code.

Luckily user ubergonmx from Cursor forum provided a solution on Windows, here’s how:

Open this folder %localappdata%\Programs\cursor\resources\app\bin

Delete:

• Code
• Code.cmd

That’s it. Now the code command will launch VSCode instead. If you look inside that folder you’d notice the file cursor and cursor.cmd are still there, which means if you want to launch cursor instead of code you can simply type cursor . , which is how it should’ve been.

That’s all folks

I’ve been a WordPress user for as long as I’ve been in tech, maybe 20 plus years. I think I picked it up as early as 2004 or something, back when it was one of the blogging platform that you can self-host just like Blogger or Movable Type. Back then Drupal, Mambo (which later spawned Joomla) and a few forum software like phpBB, InvisionBoard and vBulletin with ‘portal’ addon were considered CMS.

The reason I picked and sticked with WP was simple, it was dead easy for non-developer like myself. In the olden days, if you want to apply a ‘mod’, you need to either open up the source file, find the exact line and modify the code in there as per the author’s instruction. WordPress revolutionized this process by introducing a plugin system that essentially just works™. You only need to find the plugin, download a zip file, extract it, then FTP to your server and upload the files to wp-content/plugins and it would automagically show up in the Plugins section in your admin panel. I know that sounds like a lot of work by today’s standard, especially with the WP plugin repository just streamlined everything so you can literally add a plugin by clicking a button or two, but back then it was like magic. WordPress’s simplicity is something that many webmasters these days take for granted, but once in a while you get a reality check when switching to another legacy system (looking at you nopCommerce, having to restart the literal effing app on each plugin removal/addition is unacceptable in 2024, hell it was barely acceptable in 2012 when the project was conceived).

But enough preamble, let’s go back to the current state of things. With its ease of use, WP has now gradually grown to power close to half the whole damn internet. But 2024 has been a pretty rough year of the WordPress ecosystem, mostly because Matt Mullenweg, the guy who was supposed to be its leader, made a series of inexplicable self-destructive actions in 2024 that pretty much ruined the whole platform’s reputation. The whole thing was confusing to be honest, it started off with Mullenweg declaring war with WP Engine, a competitor to his own WordPress.org, which was a normal as any other drama, but then it got weird. Instead of pooling his resource and battle WPE like a normal person, he proceeded to destroy himself, his company and basically his entire legacy that he built over the cause of 2 decades, even resorting to thievery. It’s inexplicable, if I was a conspiracy theorist I might even assume he was working for WP Engine to begin with.

And even putting the whole drama thing aside, WordPress as a platform itself is showing its age. I learned a bunch of new things this year, even made a few fun projects using more modern tech and noticed just how fast everything is these days compare to WordPress. Some people attribute this to PHP but I disagree, Laravel is a thing and I’ve seen Laravel projects with speed that rival anything else in existence. No it’s a problem with WordPress, it’s been going for far too long, become far too bloated for its own good.

I’ve explored building a new site with Astro, migrated every post I have here over there and generally I’m happy with the speed, but I’m still too lazy to migrate over decade worth of images to the new site, so right now it’s only a massive wall of text with no images. It shouldn’t be too hard to migrate the images to imagekit or cloudinary but because I always want to take any opportunity to learn new way to self-host things (aka. likes to overcomplicate things), I want to spin up minIO and host my own S3 to keep my stuffs. That of course will take extra time, and I’m not very well known for time handling.

Let’s hope I can get some stuffs done in 2025

Just made yet another an app to split the bill between my group of pool club buddies.

Just a year earlier it would take a non-developer like me weeks to put together a tool like this. Today I was able to create a full fledge app with proper tailwind implementation, light/dark mode support with custom Google fonts, and deploy to Cloudflare Pages through Wrangler API, all within the span of half a day’s work including a bunch of back & forth iteration with Claude.

What a time to be alive!

Check it out:

Live Demo
Github

P.S: (player names are currently hard coded because this is for my personal use, if you’re interested in a version with dynamic player setup, let me know in the comments down below)

TL;DR:

Here’s the repo with instruction:

https://github.com/vnt87/textpod-toc

• 13 years ago, I met a this girl.
• She was married, but not happily so.
• 12 years ago, she officially divorced.
• 10 years ago, she found out she had a unicornuate uterus, which significantly reduce the chances of her ever conceiving a child. But I didn’t care.
• 8 years ago, we got married.
• 8 years ago, I entered a marriage, fully expecting to never be a father in this lifetime.
  

But life can never be predicted.

After hundred of trips to various different clinics, 3 failed IVF attempts and countless shed tears, that girl, my wife, did it.

At 21h30, September 14, 2024. Our baby dragon is born!

Time flies

So as you may or may not be aware, the Portfolio page and the Photography page have been broken for the longest time, well today I managed to finally fix them. I’m not going to use the old “too busy” excuse to justify why they’ve been broken for so long (although it’s true), but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why the shortcodes couldn’t parse. So eventually I decided to say f*ck it and decided to nuke everything and restore from an old backup from last year, which somehow magically fixed those pages (and also the bug where the 3D effect doesn’t work on Firefox, don’t ask me how).

Anyway now that they’re back, I should probably update them with more recent works. I don’t think I’ve added anything new for several years.

Here’s hoping I don’t take another year before getting around to actually doing it.

Okay first one down, 34 more to go. (oh yeah btw, I may have nuked my entire home server along with over 30 services running on it including Phimhub because I trusted ChatGPT to handle docker management, lesson well learned)