Creating for yourself

Today marks the 7th anniversary of starting this blog. If you've been following along for a while: thank you! 😊 After observing Volunteer Responsibility Amnesty Day in 2025 and stopping most of my volunteer OSS contributions, I really leaned hard into using my creative leisure time "for me". This has helped protect my flame from burn-out and focus on areas I'm excited about, like writing, video-games (retro, modding, ...developing? 👀), and keeping my volunteer OSS focus on mostly a single project: truststore. This year was the first time since 2016 that I was uninvolved in the latest release of urllib3, which felt both deeply rewarding and strange as I read the v2.8.0 release notes. Writing This year I published 54 articles to my blog, an average of once per week across a year. This wasn't a specific goal I had in mind, looking through the past year of articles has me thinking "oh, that was this year??". Writing continued to be a focus of my role at the PSF, too, where I wrote 14…

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