I write about my successes and failures as a form of self reflection. Hopefully, these chronicals will help myself and others.
If you consider commits to be a good metric of productivity, this year was huge. With an average of 1.7 commits per day (almost double my previous best), something about this year was clearly different. What do I credit? Monetization and LLMs.
This year, ConfessionBot will have been around for 5 years. Discord has changed a lot in that time, and while I believe ConfessionBot has been keeping up fine, this year I'm focusing on a major overhaul. A great deal of the new changes are already live, so read on to learn about all the new features and how to use them!
For the first time in many years, I lost quite a bit of work this year. I was reinstalling Linux on my server computer when I realized my SQL database backup routine was not working. Nearly every database I had made was lost. The biggest loss was Passport, my authentication service.
As I often like to do, I'll give this year a theme, users. I got plenty of experience pushing projects to production and working directly with my users this year.
As my freelance business has grown, my community have naturally centred themselves around my Discord Support Server. As Discord is primarily a gaming chat app, this might seem unusual, but this is actually quite common for any product or service which depends on Discord in some way.
Despite a wealth of Discord bot developer drama, I spent a large chunk of this year building out a Discord bot framework. A common theme for almost all of my projects this year was rewrites.
Clicker (made in 2018) was a simple game inspired by Ortiel's Cookie Clicker with a few twists. It's built with Windows Forms and Visual Basic, which was a challenge and looks very interesting as a result. It was only ever intended to be a programming exercise in a new language (Visual Basic), but in 2021, someone started sending through bug reports.
2020 was the last year of my studies, but despite the increased pressure of my final year of work for my degree, personal projects continued to grow in terms of both complexity and popularity over this year.
Hi, I'm Yiays, the sole developer of ConfessionBot, merely, MemeDB, and this blog. I build and maintain a bunch of Discord Bots, Websites, games, and tools - hosting them at cost from home.
In the past I didn't take data preservation very seriously, so much of my older work is lost - but 2019 is the year all of that changes as I make a concerted effort to add version control to all of my work and make it open source.
My portfolio website changed often during my early years as a teenage hobbyist programmer. I'm sure it's a common experience; you learn how things should have been done from the start and decide the best way to implement what you've learnt is to start from scratch.
ConfessionBot is the most advanced anonymous messaging bot on Discord, with mod tools, multiple anonymous channel types, image support, and much more!