2025 (1/2)

I was inspired by Thomasorus' quarterly updates and wanted to do one of my own, just twice a year. Both to look back at, but also just to get it out there. That's probably healthy.

Physical and mental health

The first half of 2025 has generally been good health wise, but over the summer I've not been feeling too well, as my thyroid has been bothering me again. Despite being on the correct dosage of levothyroxine, I have been feeling very tired, mood swings (shifting anxiety, depression-like feelings) and I've had persistent skin and stomach problems - all typical symptoms.

My weight has also been going up despite really focusing on what I eat. This is also related to my thyroid condition. I am now at 113kg/188cm. I am going to start cycling on my non-electrical bike again, so I hope that will help. I recently ordered some new tires for it which is still to arrive.

I've also been experiencing some loneliness. I am surrounded by my partner, my cat and good colleagues, but my close friends live across the country. I am pretty introverted, but I do like being social, I just need to prepare and have cooldown time afterwards.

I decided to do something about it this summer. I hung out with an old buddy for a few hours, but I mostly just invited folks to watch some shows at this years Roskilde Festival. I ended up just going one day. I met up with a colleague, his partner and their friends, and later an old buddy from boarding school.

I also got my phone stolen at the Knocked Loose show. Luckily, I got it back the day after, as the thief was caught with a backpack full of phones. I also went on a trip to Berlin with some good friends, and had a lovely time.

Work

Work has been great. Really exciting projects with a feeling of personal fulfilment, a new title and most recently, a new team structure.

I continue to better myself and my skills, and that was reflected on my new title as Senior Fullstack Developer. I was originally hired to do mostly frontend, but pretty much from the get go I was helping out with backend tasks, and I ended up doing features solo. I don't usually focus on titles, but the recognition is nice.

The engineering teams has also gotten a new structure, meaning I was moved to a new team. The restructure makes sense, and I already know my teammates as we work from the same office, so I am just excited to try out a new and different structure.

Right now my focus is on bettering my knowledge of the more advanced parts of MongoDB. I know a good bit, but having gotten the lead on one of our platforms, has motivated me to better my knowledge on document databases.

New PC and too new hardware for the Linux kernel

I've been running Linux on my desktop for almost 2 years at this point, and about a month ago I built a new PC.

I have had problems with my old desktop for a while, mainly the graphics card constantly failing when doing heavier loads like playing games etc. Luckily the Linux kernel comes with AMD graphics drivers, so I had never had the issues that I've heard nvidia users have.

The problem with my new pc though, was that the graphics card was too new - most Linux distros didn't have a new enough kernel to support it. I have never manually installed a newer Linux kernel on my system (and was pretty reluctant to, I just want something that works), so I went on DistroWatch and found CachyOS. After some talks with my friend Nicholai and his buddy ruby (who helped me pick the parts for my build, thanks!) I tried it out.

CachyOS is a gaming and performance focused distro built on arch. I have been pretty reluctant to try arch for a while, mostly because of the "help, I bricked my PC when updating" horror stories, but so far I haven't had any problems. I've actually become more aware of what software I install. I'm not specifically checking out source code of packages in AUR, but I do look at comments and recent updates.

That said, I hope to eventually switch back to Void Linux, Mint, or Debian, but for now it works well. :]

Other things

• I've had too little time to do any CTFs or cybersecurity studying for a while. That's something I want to focus on.
• I've walked a lot more, and want to do more hikes in the future. Sometimes it's nice not staring at the screen all day!
• I'm saddened by the way Denmark and EU is moving in terms of privacy. I used to think EU was the best place to be for digital privacy, but it's worsening a lot. Check out Fight Chat Control and write your PEMs. There are templates and email addresses on the site.
• I found out I don't like the way AI coding makes me feel. I love coding, it's super fun, but AI sucks the life out of it (and serves shit code, most of the time). Not worth it. I'll write about it later.

Thanks for reading, whoever you are :]

// nicolaj