Merry Christmas 2018

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+date = "2018-12-25T07:00:00+01:00"
+title = "Merry Christmas 2018: A Recap"
+
++++
+
+As the year 2018 ends it's time for a short recap and
+a look forward for the next year.
+
+Overall, more than half of all open tickets have been
+closed. Most tickets were opened since 2015 and I
+couldn't get to those, but now that pre-school started
+I have a lot more time! I'm aiming to keep the number
+of tickets below 100 across all my projects.
+
+Cowboy 2.x is now mature. Features are on par or better
+than the 1.x series and the HTTP/2 code is solid. I've
+been using it in customer and personal projects and I'm
+really happy with how it turned out.
+
+Ranch has received numerous contributions from Jan Uhlig
+and is going to get a 2.0 release in 2019 which will
+remove the connection supervisor bottleneck that is
+causing issues when shutting down many connections at
+the same time.
+
+Gun has received CONNECT proxy support and I am currently
+working on adding support for HTTPS connections over
+HTTPS proxies. Gun is currently being worked on, including
+a rewrite of the main code to `gen_statem`. Gun 2.0 will
+most likely be released in 2019 and will include a few
+minor breaking changes that should only impact advanced
+users.
+
+Erlang.mk has received a ton of fixes and is very solid
+now including for multi-applications repositories. It
+no longer always recompiles dependencies, speeding up
+rebuilds immensely.
+
+The Erlanger Playbook will be removed from sale for some
+time due to administrative constraints. It will be restored
+during the coming year. A new release is planned in January
+or February of 2019 and this will most likely be the final
+release. It seems that temperamentally I'm not quite writer
+material and this has been a very difficult process so I
+will not attempt to write another book on my own in the
+future.
+
+I have started working on a new project that is in the realm
+of REST, HATEOAS and the Semantic Web. The goal is to be
+able to create resources in a generic way without the
+constraints imposed by the HTTP protocol and its limitations.
+This will be my main focus in 2019 after the book update and
+the closing of tickets.
+
+I am currently waiting for Hex.pm to change its terms of
+services to be less invasive before adding Hex.pm support
+to Erlang.mk and perhaps manage my own packages. Currently
+the terms require accepting a Code of Conduct that's both
+subjective and applies to off-service user behavior, and
+that's unacceptable. A good example that these policies
+are harmful can be seen in the trouble currently going on
+at Patreon as I write this. It's even more puzzling that
+Hex.pm is just a source code storage and doesn't have user
+interactions, so these policies make little sense to me.
+I have discussed this with Hex.pm and helped review changes
+that would make the policies still bad but at least not
+outright dangerous, and I am waiting for these changes to
+be applied before implementing Hex.pm into Erlang.mk.
+
+As you may have noticed, I have stayed away from conferences
+in recent years. At first it was because I became a father,
+but in 2017 I went back to what would be the final Erlang
+User Conference. It was not the best, and as time goes on
+it seems these conferences simply no longer offer the content
+that interests me. That could be fine on its own; conferences
+are more about networking than talks after all. But I've
+recently discovered to my dismay that the conferences now
+known as Code BEAM started to play social justice games,
+where discrimination based on perceived group identity
+is seen as a good thing. I will not play these games,
+regardless of the groups being discriminated for or against.
+
+Since I'm not a writer, and conferences are a no-no at
+this point, I will be focusing on code for most of 2019
+and will perhaps attempt to create a video or two where
+I can demonstrate code, for example taking an interesting
+ticket and solving it in the video.
+
+The future looks bright as far as I'm concerned and it
+looks like I'll be able to continue dedicating almost half
+of my time to open source projects. Great things are
+coming up!
+
+I wish everyone a great holiday season, Merry Christmas,
+and I will soon take a small break to enjoy a good meal
+with the extended family and some well deserved rest.
+I still managed to squeeze in a https://github.com/erlang/otp/pull/2072[PR to Erlang/OTP]
+which will help optimize Cowboy and Gun further.
+
+You can forward Santa Claus to
+https://salt.bountysource.com/teams/ninenines[BountySource]
+for sending presents. I will use these funds to buy a Mac
+Mini or similar for testing projects under macOS. If there's
+funds remaining after that I will spend them on a similar
+machine for testing under Windows.
+
+As this is the last article of the year, I also wish you
+a Happy New Year and will be back soon with more good
+news. Cheers!