Well, another year, another summary/review of what went down. Most years, it's hard to think of a single defining moment or characteristic to use as the title for these posts, but not so much in 2023. Whilst almost half the year has happened since the Big Day™, it has continued to dominate a significant amount of our life, and I imagine some parts will remain a major focus well into 2024. Of course, I'm talking about the fact that we got married! And between planning, organising, executing, enjoying, honeymooning, and winding down, there hasn't been a huge amount of room for other focuses over the last twelve months.

The Big Day

So with that said, it only feels right to start this article off with a deep-dive into that very day, as well as all of the trials and tribulations that went before it. However, by the time I'd written everything I wanted to say, this section was 8,000 words long! For context, the last year in review (back in 2021/2022) closed out at 7,600 words. So, yeah... 😅 If you want to read up on the wedding planning, the ceremony, our decisions, and even the braai train – are you suitably intrigued? choo choo! 🚂 – then you can take a look over here.

All I want to say in this post is yet another massive thank you to everyone involved 🙏 To our friends and family. My beautiful bride and best friend. The venue and all of the people – suppliers or otherwise – who chipped in to make the day run smoothly. I've heard it said that it takes a village to raise a child; well it certainly takes one to plan and successfully hold a wedding! (Thankfully, our village is full of kick-ass humans 😎)

We had an absolutely magical day, and having so many of our closest friends and family there to support us was incredible. It meant the world to us both. So thank you, one and all, for celebrating with us 🥂

Friends & Family

Speaking of those nearest and dearest, whilst I've titled this the Year of Our Big Day, an alternate (and just as fitting title) would likely be the Year of Many Big Days, because we were far from the only ones who got married in 2023. We'd been warned a couple of years ago that we would be entering the "marriage years" soon and, sure enough, between May and September we had a minimum of one wedding a month (including our own, so we have to shoulder some blame for the onslaught 😂). 2024 is shaping up to continue that trend, with five six in the diary already^[1].

The season kicked off with Tom and JK, which was pretty huge, not just because they're two of our closest friends, but also because Alison was giving a speech in the ceremony and I had been asked to be Master of Ceremonies. I may have been quietly bricking it throughout, but my impromptu "Tom isn't getting away without some form of roasting" speech and lightly-prepped structure seemed to work well, and as soon as my duties were done I could get properly stuck into the food, the dancing, the snooker, and the alcohol 😉 All in all, we had a phenomenal time, it was a beautiful setting (as, indeed, they all have been), and it defined the tone for the rest of the summer nicely – whilst also setting the bar dangerously high!

Next up to the oche, or should I say "altar" – though one was a reconstructed Iron Age flower arch and the other was a stunning Edwardian rose garden, respectively – were Becky and Diego in deepest Wales, followed by Liv and Laino in, well, darkest Suffolk. You couldn't have asked for better weather and lovelier gatherings for both, and we silently took many mental notes that would go on to inspire our own celebrations in August. Last up, September rolled around with the straight-out-of-Dickens Dorest wedding for Julia and Mark, giving us a good spread of excuses to have travelled around and explored various parts of the country throughout the year.

Of course, alongside weddings come stag and hen dos, both our own and other peoples. In April, I travelled north to Manchester for two fun-filled days on Tom's stag, thinking how nice it was to be exploring a northern city that I've never actually visited before. Then a couple of months later in July, I found myself all-but repeating the journey, this time heading for Liverpool and my own weekend of celebrations – both organised by Adrian, who smashed it out of the park each time. These were the bread to Laino's stag sandwich in May, which took place (thankfully for the wallet) in London; an outing that arguably included too-much of a good time, based on the number of recovery days I needed afterwards 😂 Alison had a similarly packed calendar, albeit with less travelling, less expense, and fewer hangovers (though not zero 😉). Her own hen do was a much more relaxed and informal affair, starting at our house for some crafting (wedding related, of course) followed by a trip to the West End for a show and some dinner, whilst weekend events for Becky, JK, and Julia were scattered throughout the year, and were largely viewed as excuses to book a nice house somewhere in the countryside or visit a favoured restaurant – or, sometimes, both!

Beyond weddings, we started out the year doing well for friend-based activities, with several regular get-togethers in the diary. I had a roughly-monthly board games night with some old work colleagues; Alison had weekly meetups with the uni girls, which Adrian, Tom, and I briefly tried to match with our own equivalent evenings, though I think we managed a single night out with Flex and James for snooker and a curry, then maybe one online board games session, before giving up 😅; and we had a rolling games night with Theo and Mike every few weeks or so. Plus, plenty of drumming! But by the end of the year, I'm not sure anything was really left standing. The girls are still doing their thing, but it's definitely tempered in terms of frequency, whilst the rest seem to have become hopeful goals rather than firm monthly plans. Personally, I blame the wedding; once you slide out of the pattern it's so much harder to get it going again, and we were basically AWOL for August and most of September. Ah well, something to get back into for next year!

I also went on the first overseas trip with friends that I've done since – checks notes – New Zealand‽ Crikey, that's been a while! Following the wedding season, Tom and I took an absurdly last-minute trip to Portugal in November. Adrian had found himself living out there, bouncing between techie "co-lives", and seeing as we can all technically work remotely, we figured that we'd happily swap the increasingly cold and miserable UK for the much balmier weather of the Algarve for a week. From inception to getting on a flight I don't think we had much more than ten days to plan everything (closer to one week from the moment we actually agreed to do it) but I'm really glad we went. It wasn't just a nice escape from the unpleasantness of winter in the northern hemisphere, nor purely a chance to catch up with Adrian, but also an opportunity for me to visit Jo and Sean in their new home, which was great. That I squeezed in one of the best days of hiking and bird walking that I'd managed in months was the cherry on top!

On the subject of family and travel, we managed several big trips with both sets of parents in 2023. I mean, we literally started the year off with my parents in Tigh Mor, Scotland, celebrating Hogmanay with ceilidhs and snow, but we also made it out to Mallorca with them in March – overlapping with (though not really for) my birthday – before crashing one of their caravan trips and meeting up in East Anglia for a couple of days bird-watching in June. All quite different, but equally lovely, and a fun way to get out into nature and away from our laptops.

Over with the in-laws (there's a new thing I can say 😁), we visited Devon a couple of times throughout the year, including a trip for a long-promised Sharpham wine tasting that was great fun. We also ticked off a handful of combined birthday treats during a long-weekend away to explore Chatsworth house and the surrounding countryside, replete with Bakewell tart penny farthings and some excellent farm store fare. Finally, in September, we joined the whole Champernowne tribe – Arthur and co. included – in the Netherlands for a big family get together with Alison's Dutch relations. That was fascinating, filled with lectures on family history, a guided tour of Zutphen (the ancestral home), and a huge number of introductions, even if we unfortunately had to cut our time short and couldn't really do much of the touristy bit – we'll just have to go back at some point 😉

But why did we have to cut our time short? Well, unfortunately, our year wasn't all adventures and merriment. 2023 also saw the close of a generational chapter with the passing of my last grandparent. Annie came so close to making it to all four of her grandkids' weddings, but sadly was hospitalised a couple of weeks before ours following a nasty fall, one from which she would ultimately never recover. Whilst the timing of something like this can never be said to be ideal – and I would have loved for her to have seen the party we put on, as I think she'd have had a great time – it did mean the whole family was together and nearby in her final days. She only lived a short distance from the venue (it had been a major point in its favour) and had received treatment for the fall just down the coast, in Southampton Hospital, so everyone was able to visit her over that week or so. She ultimately left us whilst we were away on our honeymoon, with the funeral following shortly after, on the day we were meant to travel to Zutphen. Thankfully, we could move things around a bit and still make both family gatherings, and she got one heck of a send-off in the end. In typical Annie fashion, she'd meticulously planned every aspect of the funeral – down to which grandkid was to do which reading! – which meant the family was just left with the logistics of informing and inviting her enormous circle of friends. I think over a hundred people ultimately attended the service; for someone so sociable and fond of others, that was the most fitting tribute you could have asked for.

Health

Thankfully, our year was otherwise largely absent of illness and death. I'm sure there were a few colds and general bugs, but all of that is long since forgotten. No, the main health news was our combined efforts to first lose weight for the wedding, and then ultimately undo all of that work immediately afterwards 😂

We entered 2023 firmly focused on our goal to walk to Mordor; a "Conqueror Challenge" which required us to walk, swim, or run around 2,000 km, roughly equivalent to the best-guess distance that Frodo travelled during the Lord of the Rings. We'd already made it through to Rivendell, under the Misty Mountains, and down to Lorien, but as the year began we were just starting the longest stretch: down the Anduin river and over the Dead Marshes. A total of 1075km – over half of the distance – until our next "waypoint" (and medal). Our goal was to get to Mount Doom before the wedding, and despite running over on the Dead Marshes by almost three weeks, I finally clocked the final kilometre the night before 😅 (Alison, of course, had made it there about three weeks prior).

Walking would ultimately play a large part in our decision making throughout the year as a result, with lots of hiking, bird watching, and choosing slower, foot-power routes over public transport (particularly if the time taken would have been similar). But it wasn't the only form of exercise we had on the go. January, February, and even into March, we were fairly regular at playing table tennis, either on a makeshift table in our living room, or at a proper facility in one of the side rooms at our nearby public gym and library. This was great fun, but fizzled out as our calendars filled up, and finding a spare evening became more difficult. I also picked up football again, playing weekly in a 5-aside league with Tom, Adrian, and various other people that they knew. It was good fun (even if we were absolutely awful, winning one game total the entire time 😄) and I would definitely like to continue playing in 2024, but with those two off travelling for large chunks of the next year, I fear it may have taken a backseat for now. Plus, it did result in a badly torn-up ankle – which still hasn't properly healed – and a smashed toenail. Oh, and tangentially, an insect bite that became infected and saw me on antibiotics for my stag do 😬

Still, the combination of generally prioritising health for the first six months of the year definitely paid off. I don't track my weight, so I'm not sure how that fluctuated, but by the time of the wedding I was able to slide back into old trousers that used to be a little tight, dance for a whole evening without KO'ing the next day, and generally felt fitter than I had done in years. At the end of the day, I don't hate how I look in the wedding photos, so I'll take that as a win 😁

Post-wedding, things have changed a bit. As mentioned, football has disappeared, the winter weather has made long hikes much less appealing, and with Alison away at university (and a particularly strong run of limited edition burgers at Burger King), my diet has gone down the pan. I think I'm likely ending the year overall worse than I started, which is a shame. Damn you smokey chimichurri sauce! 😅

Education (sort of)

Yeah, okay, I guess I need to explain that university comment. Back in May or June, Alison gave a talk at a sixth form college where one of our friends works. She really enjoyed the experience, but one of the questions that a student asked about skills applications in the real world stuck with her. Fast forward a month or so and she'd discovered a Masters programme in Behavioural Economics & Data Science, based at the University of East Anglia, and thrown her name in the ring. Then, the day before our wedding, she received her acceptance letter. By the time we'd returned from our honeymoon, accommodation and financing had also been confirmed, as had a year-long sabbatical from work. Term started in a couple of weeks, and with everything aligning, she took the leap and headed off to Norwich.

I still have fun telling people that my wife moved out after only two weeks of marriage 😉

As you might expect, this has changed our patterns somewhat. We've stopped drumming (for now) and for about a month it seemed likely that Adrian might even move in with me, so we rearranged the guest bedroom and Alison's downstairs office, ready for a long-term lodger. In the end, he chose Portugal over our spare room, and I can't really blame him, but that just meant I was by myself for days at a time. It's actually been quite fun, getting to live "alone" for the first time since, well, realistically, ever. Although Alison's back at home more-and-more as her course continues, and has even fewer contact hours next term, so I'm not sure it really counts.

I'd love to say I've been using the time to teach myself a new language (computer or otherwise); catch up on my reading list; take up a new hobby etc. But in reality, we were still deep in wedding admin well into November – hell, the wedding videos still haven't arrived – and then Christmas was looming large. Oh, and then there was all of the travelling. In short, I've not really had any real spare time, and am very much looking forward to the next two terms to see what I do with it once I have some again.

Travel

Speaking of which, one of my goals for 2023 was to travel more and, by gove, I think we succeeded here! Alongside our various parental jaunts, stag dos, and wedding outings – which, admittedly, took us to Scotland, Wales, seven English counties, the Netherlands, and Mallorca – we also managed to get out to Portugal (as mentioned), Northern Ireland, Islay (for our honeymoon), and even Rwanda! But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The first trip of the year (not counting Hogmanay) was an excuse both wrapped up in and as a Christmas-present. I'd bought Alison tickets to a Harry Potter-themed comedy show in Belfast, which obviously meant a weekend away to Northern Ireland for the both of us. Unbeknownst to me, I'd even timed it to coincide with the Belfast TradFest celebrations, which made for a truly magical weekend of folk music, pubs, quirky entertainment, and general exploration.

Wedding planning dominated our lives post-Mallorca so travel was shelved for a bit, but as the wedding loomed, so did the honeymoon. Whilst we're only technically counting this as a "mini-moon", we still had a fantastic time. We wanted everything to be as easy as possible, so limited ourselves to Monday afternoon flights from Southampton airport – a short drive from the venue. Now, that didn't present us with boundless opportunities, but between Glasgow or Guernsey (apparently Monday is for the letter G – don't tell the Count!) we chose the former. After all, Glasgow is only a short drive from the Inner Hebrides, and we do love that part of the world. We ended up hiring a car and spending a lovely night on Loch Lomond, then caught the ferry to Islay, an island neither of us had visited before, but felt would make an ideal base for a week of walking, whisky, and little else. We found ourselves a beautiful little stone cottage in the middle of an RSPB reserve, loaded up on drams on our first day, and spent the next three exploring our little corner of the isle. Throw in a fancy (and incredibly fresh!) seafood boat trip – complete with more lobster and crab than you could think what to do with, plus the best scallops I've ever eaten – and it was our kind of paradise. We even managed to drop into the Hill House near Glasgow on our way home. Exactly what we needed after the months of planning!

We returned from Islay to an incredibly clean house (my parents had been staying whilst we were away) and the aforementioned acceptance letters for Alison! So as she began packing up her life to move several counties away for the next year, I turned an eye to our next big trip: Rwanda. We'd learned at Laino's wedding that James and Aldina were likely returning to the UK – permanently – before Christmas, and we weren't about to miss out on visiting them in Africa yet again, especially as Robin and Lark are still out there and living just down the road from them. After a few late-night Zoom calls, we had a rough itinerary planned, tickets bought, and dates set. For the first time ever I was heading to Africa, but stopping only just south of the equator.

Rwanda was completely fantastic. We maximised our time by flying out on a red-eye Friday evening and returning on a red-eye Sunday night, with half-days booked off either end, giving us a total of 16 days in country. It still wasn't quite enough, but I'm happy that we maximised the time we had! Within hours of landing we were out with the full crew – Robin, Lark, James, and Aldina – at a nearby nature reserve and wildlife rehab centre, before diving into the local culinary scene with some utterly delicious barbequed tilapia and assorted sides. After a day exploring Kigali – with its Motos, museums, and buffet lunches – we struck out to see the rest of the country, letting the others get back to their jobs 😉

Our route effectively looped around most of the West, first taking us due south to Nyungwe National Park (tea plantations, primates, hiking, and some of the most productive bird watching I've ever experienced, mainly thanks to our incredible guide – thank you JP!), then up the long, serenity of Lake Kivu, and on to the beach bars of Gisenyi. Here we met up with Robin, James, and Aldina again for a relaxing pause, before all-but-Robin travelled on with us to the northern border to spend a night with the nuns, overlooking the utterly stunning Twin Lakes, and enjoying their famous hospitality (and butter 🤤). We ended this leg of the trip with a visit to the edge of Volcanoes National Park and the Diane Fossey conservation centre, before we dropped James and Aldina back in Kigali. Here, we took a moment to swap cars and see more of the city's sights, before heading out once again to spend our final four nights in and around Akagera National Park, on the eastern border, replete with night drives, boat safaris, and all manner of fun wildlife watching.

On our final day, we awoke in our hilltop campsite to a fiery sunrise inching over the Tanzanian hills, before loading the 4x4s and driving through Akagera's northern plains, once again joined by the whole gang, plus several of their local friends. We stopped for breakfast at an unfenced picnic site, a herd of buffalo in clear site, having just passed lions further down the road, and with hyena tracks fresh in the mud between our wheel ruts. Then we drove back to Kigali, showered, packed our bags, and hopped in a taxi.

We certainly kept ourselves busy, and yet didn't feel rushed off our feet, possibly because we interspersed adventuring with time spent with friends. Either way, we had a brilliant couple of weeks and would thoroughly recommend going yourself – even if there were a few interesting car-related mishaps 😅

Overall, then, we definitely began getting back out in the world, taking trips and visiting people. We're still masking in planes and airports, and wherever possible quarantining prior to big trips to reduce the risk of picking something up at the worst possible time, so it certainly doesn't feel like a return to pre-2020 travel, but it's definitely a swing back towards our old habits of exploration, and I'm hopeful we can manage more in the year ahead – even if we likely won't have the time (or funds) to top Rwanda 😉

Work

I continue to thoroughly enjoy my not-so-new-found career working on the web, even if 2023 heralded the start of what feels like a long-slide towards a much contracted job market.

Thankfully, I've been spared for now, and continue to work at Appnovation as a Senior Front-End Engineer^[2], but the company has changed a lot. I think in total we had three rounds of redundancies across the year, and even as late as December, positions were being left permanently vacant as yet further people left of their own volition. The general market trends indicate that 2024 may be a bit better, but the overall direction appears to be a slimming-down of the tech sector and related budgets.

A big part of that has been the rise of "AIs" – aka Large Language Models – and their uncanny ability to automate a wide variety of rolls. What started the year as a novelty has definitely made its mark known, and whilst I remain sceptical over the long-term economic and environmental viability of the technology, in the short-term I'm definitely predicting further job losses as more and more roles get automated out of existence.

On a more personal level, whilst I've yet to find a consistently beneficial use-case for these new technologies for myself, I have ended up working in related areas, spending a good chunk of the year building various MVPs and POCs on top of the regular suspects in the commercial LLM space. Those projects have certainly been interesting, but it hasn't assuaged my feelings that the whole market is built atop quicksand, and I'm glad we aren't pivoting in that direction entirely.

Most of my year, though, has been spent working in areas that I find more actively engaging and enjoyable, which has been great. On the accessibility front, I used my personal development budget to enroll onto Sara Soueidan's Practical Accessibility course, which I am continuing to progress through and learn a heap from. I was also given some dedicated time at work to really dig into the upcoming EU accessibility legislation (the EAA), putting together a few explainers and internal documents in the process – and a blog post, which I should really get around to publishing! 

From a broader front-end perspective, along with personal projects using Astro, I've been able to further explore Chakra UI (which I actually quite like) and CUBE CSS (which is great); trial a POC using a heap of very modern CSS and design token best practices (completely eye-opening); and actually spend some time with Gatsby again, which was fascinating – it really does do quite a lot of things better than Next.js, but is utterly hamstrung by the inability to both maintain those advantages and provide server rendering, which is a damn shame^[3].

Overall, I'm pretty happy with how the "career stuff" has gone this year. I continue to focus my skills development towards UI engineering, and am actively working towards becoming an accessibility SME within my current team. I've even managed to give a few internal talks on subjects like the EAA and upcoming CSS functionality, which have been good fun and left me wondering if I should consider shopping them out to some small meetups or conferences at some point, now I have a bit more free time 🤔

Home

Predictably, we've not had much time to dedicate towards the house this year. After all of the big moves and subsequent furniture shuffling last couple of years, we've not had much desire to get stuck into a new project, and what with the wedding, we wouldn't have had the time even if we did have the inclination. We've had the fence pre-emptively repaired again^[4] and, as mentioned, we've moved Alison's crafting gear down into her newly rearranged home office, to free up space in the canopy (i.e. guest room). Oh, and we did inherit a good amount of garden furniture and tools from my grandmother, which is useful, even if we haven't really worked out what to do with them yet 😅

The car, on the other hand, has had a bunch of work done. Between a sudden (and explosive) flat tyre^[5] on our trip to Chatsworth and a total MOT failure in December that required both rewelding the front suspension cover and a whole new radiator, it hasn't been cheap keeping it going 😬 We had threatened to scrap it if the final bill came to over £1,000 but, almost as if it heard us, the total was actually "only" £984, so it lives for at least one more year^[6].

Otherwise, there's little to report on this front. Last year I happily typed up a section covering our ongoing smart home experimentation, with automated curtains, lights, and a recently-purchased Home Assistant hub PC. One year on and... the hub PC is still sitting in the box, half the lights still can't talk to anything else (they need the hub), and the rest are quietly chugging along with the same configuration they had 12 months ago. Perhaps something to pick up again in 2024 😉

Hobbies

Photography

The big news on the photography front is that 2023 became the year that I finally caved and bought a bunch of new gear.

Mainly, I wanted to make sure that our likely once-in-a-lifetime trip to Rwanda wasn't undercut by camera frustrations. My main concern was the inconsistent quality I was getting, particularly from the Sigma 150-600. Sometime photos were tack sharp, but often they missed focus, despite using very fast shutter speeds and stopping the aperture up to a supposed "sweet spot". In an effort to work out how I could improve the situation, I ended up going for both the expensive solution and the cheap one: I finally shelled out for a decent tripod (a 3 Legged Things Travis 2.0, which has been fantastic so far) and I picked up some testing plates to check for specific lens faults. I also bought the Sigma USB dock so that I could try modifying the focus profiles and make sure the firmware was up to date.

In the end, after several trips out to nature reserves and a few afternoons testing various set ups in our back yard, I came to a slightly infuriating conclusion: the protective UV filter I'd paid a considerable amount for was causing focus distortions on anything more than about 10m away! So whilst I'd been correct that the lens was sharpest at f/9 and right that a tripod/monopod would be super useful in helping stabilise my photos, the real "fix" was just to throw away that filter and start using the lens "nude". I imagine lots of photographers will now be rolling their eyes at the idea that you would ever put a secondary layer of glass over such a complex piece of kit, but in my defense, I've witnessed first hand how these filters can save your gear – in New Zealand, Adrian had a rock shard hit a lens straight on, whipped up by strong winds, which shattered the UV filter entirely, but left the actual glass protected. And that was with a lens hood on and the camera being carried facing down – these things do happen! Still, an ultra-zoom that can't focus more than 10m away is fundamentally not worth carrying, so if it's a choise between a broken lens now or the possibility of a broken lens in the future, I'll take the latter 😉

Of course, spending so much time playing around with my camera gear was a great way to highlight some of the other small niggles I have with it. Being able to quickly swap between different telephoto lenses in the field is a pain, and I'd also noticed some worrying behaviour from the M6 itself, occassionally freezing up, failing to correctly identify autofocus settings, and having moments where the trigger seemed to not register any presses at all. Seeing as I was already doing a bunch of research, I began finding some additional solutions.

On the carrying front, I became convinced of the utility benefits of upgrading my strap and picking up some "camera clips", both of which have been brilliant and slightly life changing decisions. We ended up buying both versions of the Peak Design Slide strap, which we use interchangeably between my cameras and Alison's binoculars; I love how quickly you can disconnect these straps, particularly for use with a tripod. As for the clips, these came from Peak Design as well, and I absolutely love them. I have one mounted on each of my backpack's waist straps, letting me clip something on each hip; absolutely ideal for long hikes. The idea had been to have one clip holding a spare lens, whilst the other would take the camera with a second lens already mounted. However, in reality, I mainly walk around with a camera on one clip and... another camera on the other.

Which brings me nicely onto the last (and biggest) purchase of the year: a brand new Canon R8. Even with the Sigma fully tweaked, the UV filter removed, the tripod set up, and all of the testing I could think of, I was still finding the images out of the M6 a little disappointing. The smaller sensor definitely struggles with low-light conditions and whilst the ISO performance is admirable, it's far from amazing. On top of which, the autofocus would routinely grab a bird or animal (great!) and then jump to some tree motion in the background or a ripple in the water at the exact moment you pressed the shutter button (argh!). Plus, funnily enough, now that I was able to go on a walk with my 70-200 on my waist and easily swap between the two telephoto lenses, I was finding the extra reach innate to an APS-C camera a little irritating 😅

So why an R8? The R-series cameras come with much better autofocus (and we're talking a generational improvement; it's night and day compared to the subtle improvements in the M6) and being a full-frame camera it has a wider field of view and much better lowlight capabilities. In other words, its strengths counteract all of the weakness of the M6.

Still, I ummed and ahhed over the purchase for well over a month before finally caving. It was arguably an expense I couldn't really afford, between the wedding and Rwanda. But I am so, so glad that I took the risk. I love the R8. Do I sometimes wish it was an APS-C sensor for that extra 1.6x magnification? Sure. Do I really wish that the R8 was APS-C and the M6 was full-frame? Absolutely. The M6 would be a phenomenal little city camera if paired with a wide-angle, sharp lens, but as it is you have to go ultrawide to make it work, and that comes with distortion, which is a real shame. But the photos I get out of the R8 are just fantastic. The autofocus is game-changing, the ISO quality is phenomenal, and I've not had any of the much-complained-about focusing issues that seem to affect the R7 and original R6. For the price, it's a ridiculously good camera, and I would strongly recommend it.

Plus, I actually really enjoy having two cameras on me when out walking. There's much less FOMO around lens choice and it provides a huge amount of utility. The only downside is that the R8 is so good it makes using the M6 feel worse than it really is, which is sad, because I do love that little camera and it should have several more years of use in it – so long as these hardware issues don't get any worse 😬

On the software front, there's much less to talk about. I'm still using Lightroom and still refining my process there, but with each year those refinements get smaller and less interesting to write up.

I guess the big one this year was the adoption of a star-rating system. I'm still moulding it to fit my workflow but, effectively, I wanted to be able to easily export subsets of a given album:

• Everything I want to keep;
• Images that provide a narrative benefit;
• Photos I think are technically well done and/or interesting;
• Absolute bangers 😂

This effectively works out to 2* or lower being photos that I want to keep for some personal reason, whilst 4* and higher are ones that I'd like to share with other people, but it's a surprisingly fiddly system to get right.

For instance, I'm finding that I don't feel like I can ever use the 5* category, even though it functionally replaces the existing Pick flag, whilst 4* feels overloaded. I also want to be able to distinguish between 3* photos that I'd be happy to share privately and those I'd be happy to share publicly (mainly because they contain other people or events that I'd consider more personal in some way), which makes me wonder if I should go back to using Pick as a psuedo-6* rating, and bump the others around accordingly. Or collapse 1* and 2* together? As you can see, I'm still working on it.

Otherwise, the general workflow has settled down into a fairly predictable pattern. I'm finding more and more time to go through photos and 2023 is one of the best years to date for actually staying on top of the backlog of new images, despite everything else we had going on. I still have plenty of trips in a partially sorted state, and I don't edit photos individually anywhere near as much as I'd like, but it does feel a lot more manageable these days.

Web Stuff

There haven't been any huge updates on this site over the past twelve months, but (once again) that is largely due to the Big Day. Any time I would have normally spent tinkering or trying out new ideas has instead been dedicated to building our wedding website.

On the one hand, I'm extremely happy to have built something bespoke and really left our/my mark on the process as a result. Whilst design isn't my strong suit, we commissioned some drawings from one of our talented friends and they combined really nicely with a faux-sketchbook style that I've been noodling over for several years, which meant it actually came together surprisingly easily and I was very happy with the result^[7].

I also used the wedding site as an excuse to try out the Astro framework, which I absolutely loved. It felt like a much safer bet compared to something like Eleventy, because I knew I could fall back to using React components if I needed to, which ended up coming in very handy. But because you can pick and choose where to utilise React, I found myself defaulting to regular ol' JavaScript more often than I had thought I would, which really helped remove some mental blockers over how to do things without relying on a state-abstraction like, well, React. The end result was far more rewarding than I'd expected.

In fact, I've become something of a cheerleader for Astro, and have been slowly chipping away at my colleagues to try and get us to experiment with it at work as well. I'm definitely interested in doing more with it this year, and would love to move parts of this site over to it, whenever time allows. I definitely need to write up my thoughts in more detail, but suffice to say, I was very impressed and found it remarkably easy to pick up.

The one major downside to building our own wedding website, though, was the sheer amount of debugging necessary within a finite timescale. It's been quite a while since I picked up a personal project with any semblance of a deadline, let alone several key milestones that had to be hit. Whilst I did get it launched on time (just about), it was a lot more stressful than I'd bargained for; it turns out that hand-coding an RSVP form was a much larger challenge than I'd considered. This was the main area I fell back on React for, but even still, it took days of patiently mapping out user journeys and option trees to ensure that people could RSVP to the right parts, provide the necessary information, and ultimately get what they needed on the day. As I say, I'm extremely glad to have made our site, but I'm not sure I'd do it again if asked to repeat things – and certainly wouldn't recommend it, particularly with entirely free services out there which would have gotten us about 80% of the way there with 10% of the effort.

The one main advantage is that it's ours for as long as we want it, which means I'll be moving it over to this domain at some point in the future (because .wedding domains are expensive 😬), where it can then live indefinitely. We've also been able to modify it after the wedding to host our photos and the videos of the event, so there are some clear plus points, but I still think I'd struggle to recommend it as a course of action, given all of the other time pressures we had.

Back on theAdhocracy, whilst the front end hasn't changed at all, there have been some subtle changes to the back end. Building on from what I wrote about last year, journalling has become increasingly tricky. I still find the finished output incredibly useful and meaningful, but the process has begun to drag a little too much, and the lack of a searchable UI is getting very problematic.

From a process perspective, the main concern here is the time it takes to input content. From slow database queries, to nesting entries, to far too many button presses, and a lot of repetition in terms of data entry, it's just too fiddly. The result was becoming super frustrating to use, so I stopped. For the last five months or so I've mainly been journalling on WorkFlowy, whilst absentmindedly noodling away at process improvements in Craft, where possible.

A big change I'm now fairly settled on is moving towards a one-post-per-day model. Rather than splitting up activities into unique entries, I'd like to be able to create a daily post and then add everything we did in one go. I think this will help make the writing part easier (less stopping and starting) and will certainly reduce some of the repetition, as I can group things together logically a little more and simplify various parts of the editing UI.

Of course, the main reason I split everything out in the first place was to facilitate easier differentiation on the front end. Whilst that UI has never materialised, my goals for it remain the same, so there is some concern there. However, from what I've seen of Craft 5, the direction that they're heading will actually pair with this new strategy really well, giving me the best of both worlds 🤞

And speaking of Craft, the one big job I did complete this year was upgrading to Craft 4. I've lost one plugin in the process (Netlify Hooks), but around March the last of the absolutely core extensions was finally ported over, and I found some time to work through the migration. Of course, having spent a day creating backups-of-backups and painstakingly running through documentation, the whole thing went very smoothly – but you know that if I hadn't done all of that upfront prep it would have been a nightmare somehow 😅

Everything Else

Finally, we did plenty this year which didn't quite manage to fit into any of the other sections:

• I actually managed to get away on a solo wildlife outing! I've always wanted to do more of this, so finding the time in 2023 to spend a weekend exploring Kent at my own pace was great. I visited a new (to me) RSPB reserve on the Thamesmouth and was rewarded with my first British spoonbills. I then spent the night at a fun little pub in a lovely village, before walking around Elmley (I'm now a member) for a whole day.
• I also went walking with Adrian – twice! – during otherwise spare periods of time. Once to Nonsuch Park, which was rather lovely, and then back to Elmley (again), where we even squeezed in a guided walking safari that featured several owls and a stunning starling murmuration!
• In August, fresh back from our honeymoon, Alison and I found some time to try out paddleboarding, spending a day on the Thames with an instructor. She absolutely loved it; I don't really understand the appeal 😅 Give me a canoe any day of the week and I'll happily paddle along beside her, but the constant balancing was exhausting and – for me – really detracted from being on the water 🤷‍♀️
• On the subject of water sports, in September we decided to treat ourselves to a day out at the races... the kayak races! Alison somehow discovered that the World Kayak Championships were happening in London, up at the old Olympic facilities. We ended up getting tickets for the finale of the new Olympic sport, and watched Britain clinch gold in both the mens and womens titles 🥇🥇
• We finally got around to watching Hamilton (it was phenomenal), as well as Noises Off, Potter Vision (Belfast), The Lehmann Trilogy (the craftsmanship here – from actors, techies, everyone – was incredible), and even Cirque du Soleil, who had a steampunk theme this year – ideal 😁
• On the music front, we managed to see Sam Sweeney, the Philharmonic Orchestra, and Puuluup. I had to cancel our annual Goldfish plans, unfortunately, and we bailed on a few other opportunities due to COVID concerns – hopefully next year we'll get back on the gig circuit in earnest!
• We also got out to see the Astrophotography awards in Greenwich; the Wildlife Photographer of the Year at the NHM; and spent a wonderful evening with Mike and Theo at a science-fiction themed "lates" at the Science Museum.

Plus, plenty of board games, good pubs, and excellent meals out. I'm sure that I've forgotten twice as much as I've written here – don't be too surprised if this gets edited a few times as things pop back in my mind 😅

In Summary

I'd normally close out a year-in-review write up with a look back at the goals I'd set in January, and a look forward to my hopes for the year ahead. But I never got around to publishing my 2022 "in review" (I'm working on it, I swear 😉), and I think I want to split that type of stuff out into a standalone post this year, anyway.

So instead, I'll just say this. 2023 was, in many ways, a monumental undertaking. We visited countries we've been meaning to visit for years. We caught up with people that we haven't seen in ages. We gave speeches and celebrated with some of our closest friends. We walked to Mordor. We learned new skills. We sought out new experiences. And we got married. There were some sad moments, for sure, but the last twelve months contained some of the brightest points I've ever experienced.

And yet, I'm glad to see the back of it. I'm happy that I'm no longer planning a gigantic event. Or buying a house. Or organising a secret engagement. I know we'll have plenty of projects, plans, and ideas for the next year; we'll keep ourselves busy, like we always do. But I also want to take a year off all of the big, weighty stuff, and just focus on the little things for a while. With Alison away at university – another big undertaking, admittedly! – my sole hope for 2024 is to take a bit of a deep breath. Clear the lungs. Empty the brain. I want to say more on that, but I'll leave it there for now.

The Year of Our Big Day is over. Now we turn our attention to the many years of our new life still ahead 🍻