Looking back on the past 5 years

Last day of 2024.

The past 5 years has been great.

Found a good match on a dating app. We dated for about a year and then got married.

Found a good company to work at.

Son was born this year in March.

Of course these are my ups and there are some downs, but there’s no need to talk about those.

Things are going great for me ever since I moved into my own home. I often think that this home is bringing me all sorts of good luck, and I enjoy spending time alone at home.

Looking forward to the next few years to come.

My son

badreq

One of my pet projects is a webmail client that uses email sending services like Sendgrid to send and receive email. This would be cheaper, and perhaps free, than buying a mailbox account from services like Namecheap (USD 9 per year). Provided you don’t exceed their limits.

I would lose out on the IMAP features but I plan to implement discord notifications via webhooks. And maybe I can try implementing an IMAP server should I ever find a good library for it.

While working for this project, I wanted to know what data is being sent to my webhook but since this project is still under development, I didn’t want to setup the server for it yet.

This led me to build badreq.com that lets me create webhook URLs and view the data that gets sent to it.

Built in 2 days using the TALL stack: TailwindCSS, AlpineJS, Laravel, Livewire. The process has been enjoyable.

Another Chapter

Quit my full time job in March and started taking a break from full time work since the start of April.

The first week of April had me busy moving all the stuff in my room to my new home. The huge Ikea Galant table was the hardest, but I managed to move it over single handedly.

Managed to get the neccessary things moved over before the COVID-19 lockdown.

The next few weeks and months, I spent my time doing nothing productive. And because of the lockdown, I didn’t travel further than 200 metres away from home, and was comfortable with it.

In July, I began working on my own SaaS (Software as a Service) product whose details I won’t share much publicly until it’s done.

Every morning I wake up at 8am, make or buy breakfast. Take a shower and with a cup of hot coffee, I sit down in front of my computer and begin working while listening to music from my old yet wonderful Klipsch Promedia GMX 2.1 speakers.

Being someone who enjoys staying at home, I don’t feel affected much by COVID-19. Perhaps I will when I begin searching for a job if my SaaS product doesn’t take off.

But for now, it feels good to have a spacious and comfortable room to work in.

What are you waiting for?

The phrase, “What are you waiting for?” is so overused in advertising. I wonder who the first advertiser is who used it.

Many years ago, a company that runs a huge anime convention every year in Singapore, made a facebook post to tell their fans that tickets are now up for sale.

As you suspect, they ended the post with the words “What are you waiting for?”

And so I left a comment in that post saying “Waiting for the price of the tickets to fall.”

My comment soon got deleted and I noticed they stopped using these words again in future posts.

2020

My first post on this blog was dated 1st Jan 2004. I’m quite sure I started blogged 1~2 years before that. So it makes it about 18 years of blogging. Back then the blog was named “Elusive Emotions”, because of the various thoughts and emotions that I was experiencing back then during my student years. (most likely I was just an emo person back then, lol)

Looking back at my 2004 post, I had apparently spent the night alone at Orchard Road, witnessing the chaos everywhere at countdown. This year, I opted to just spend the night at home, gaming, chatting and drinking with my Japanese friends. Didn’t even bother to look out the window to listen for fireworks anymore.

2019 has been the peak of my life so far. I bought a house, and will finally get to enjoy air conditioning. I had the storeroom separating 2 rooms torn down in order to combine the 2 rooms to make one long room for myself.

As of now, the renovation is still in progress. Some parts of the house may not be visually pleasing to many but it’s mostly because this apartment I bought is old and so the structure isn’t aircon-pipe friendly. I can live with it though. I’m just happy to finally have more space for myself, and much better living conditions for my parents.

As a person who enjoys sci-fi movies a lot, this decade would be my favourite. Back then, futuristic movies often refer to years in this decade. (I can’t think of any titles so I’m just basing it off my feelings).

Can’t wait to see how far technology will progress this decade.