Journal tags: years

I have a feeling that 2025 is going to be a year of reflection for me. It’s such a nice round number, 25. One quarter of a century.

That’s also how long myself and Jessica have been married. Our wedding anniversary was last week.

Top tip: if you get married in year ending with 00, you’ll always know how long ago it was. Just lop off the first 2000 years and there’s the number.

As well as being the year we got married (at a small ceremony in an army chapel in Arizona), 2000 was also the year we moved from Freiburg to Brighton. I never thought we’d still be here 25 years later.

2005 was twenty years ago. A lot of important events happened that year. I went to South by Southwest for the first time and met people who became lifelong friends (including some dear friends no longer with us).

I gave my first conference talk. We had the first ever web conference in the UK. And myself, Rich, and Andy founded Clearleft. You can expect plenty of reminiscence and reflection on the Clearleft blog over the course of this year.

2010 was fifteen years ago. That’s when Jessica and I moved into our current home. For the first time, we were paying off a mortgage instead of paying a landlord. But I can’t bring myself to consider us “homeowners” at that time. For me, we didn’t really become homeowners until we paid that mortgage off ten years later.

2015 was ten years ago. It was relatively uneventful in the best possible way.

2020 was five years ago. It was also yesterday. The Situation was surreal, scary and weird. But the people I love came through it intact, for which I’m very grateful.

Apart from all these anniversaries, I’m not anticipating any big milestones in 2025. I hope it will be an unremarkable year.

In attempt to improve my Irish language skills, which are currently not very good at all, I’ve started using Duolingo. It’s quite good fun, with the just the right level of challenge so far.

Then there’s the gamification. Plenty of encouragement and nudging with prizes and streaks. Simon reckons it pays off:

It turns out the streak mechanism was exactly what I needed. That tiny piece of effort, repeated every day over multiple years, really does add up.

He mentions it in relation to Tom’s recently-ended ten-year streak of posting a video every single week.

During The Situation, I posted a video of myself playing a tune every day for 200 days.

A few years before that I did a 100 days challenge, publishing a post with exactly 100 words every day.

In both cases, the level of difficulty was just about right. If it were too difficult, the endeavour would inevitably fail at some point. As Robin says:

But every ounce of progress I’ve ever made is because I’ve focused on much, much smaller goals. Goals so small that they don’t even look like goals. Just write this morning. Just finish that chapter. Just get one less coffee. Just go for a walk over that hill. Just don’t eat that. Just call. Just work. Just sleep. These tiny, every day details are where progress is made. The small routines.

He mentions that in relation to new year’s resolutions, which are often far too broad and sweeping in scope. That chimes with something Justin Searles wrote recently:

I’ve never accomplished anything I felt proud of by setting a goal. In fact, the surest way to ensure I don’t do something is to set a goal. When asked to set goals for myself, I’ve found that expressing the goal (as opposed to achieving it) becomes my overriding objective.

I’m also not a fan of new year’s resolutions, though I do quite like Tina’s:

Keep slowing down. (Notice how everything’s still happening? Nothing is breaking.)

Like Anna says:

Forget resolutions, let’s all do less.

And if you are going to set a goal or resolution for yourself, why would you do it in the deepest gloom of winter? I’ve written about this before:

Think about it. It’s January. The middle of winter. It’s cold outside. The days are short. The only seasonal foods available are root vegetables and brassicas. Considering this lack of sunlight and fruit, it seems inadvisable to try to also deny yourself the intake of sugar, alcohol, meat, carbohydrates or gluten. You’re playing with a stacked deck. And then when inevitably, in the depths of winter, you cave in and pour yourself a glass of wine or indulge in a piece of cake, you now have the added weight of guilt on your shoulders to carry through the neverending winter nights.

So I’m not making any new year’s resolutions. Maybe I’ll make a Summer soltice resolution. But I’m not promising anything.

On June 3rd, 2001, I launched thesession.org. Happy twentieth birthday to The Session!

Although actually The Session predates its domain name by a few years. It originally launched as a subdirectory here on adactio.com with the unwieldly URL /session/session.shtml

That incarnation was more like a blog. I’d post the sheetmusic for a tune every week with a little bit of commentary. That worked fine until I started to run out of tunes. That’s when I made the site dynamic. People could sign up to become members of The Session. Then they could also post tunes and add comments.

That’s the version that is two decades old today.

The last really big change to the site happened in 2012. As well as a complete redesign, I introduced lots of new functionality.

In all of those incarnations, the layout was fluid …long before responsive design swept the web. That was quite unusual twenty years ago, but I knew it was the webby thing to do.

What’s also unusual is just keeping a website going for twenty years. Keeping a community website going for twenty years is practically unheard of. I’m very proud of The Session. Although, really, I’m just the caretaker. The site would literally be nothing without all the contributions that people have made.

I’ve more or less adopted a Wikipedia model for contributions. Some things, like tune settings, can only be edited by the person who submitted it But other things, like the track listing of a recording, or the details of a session, can be edited by any member of the site. And of course anyone can add a comment to any listing. There’s a certain amount of risk to that, but after testing it for two decades, it’s working out very nicely.

What’s really nice is when I get to meet my fellow members of The Session in meatspace. If I’m travelling somewhere and there’s a local session happening, I always get a warm welcome. I mean, presumably everyone would get a warm welcome at those sessions, but I’ve also had my fair share of free pints thanks to The Session.

I feel a great sense of responsibility with The Session. But it’s not a weight of responsibility—the way that many open source maintainers describe how their unpaid labour feels. The sense of responsibility I feel drives me. It gives me a sense of purpose.

The Session is older than any client work I’ve ever done. It’s older than any books I’ve written. It’s even older than Clearleft by a few years. Heck, it’s even older than this blog (just).

I’m 50 years old now. The Session is 20 years old. That’s quite a chunk of my life. I think it’s fair to say that it’s part of me now. Of all the things I’ve made so far in my life, The Session is the one I’m proudest of.

I’m looking forward to stewarding the site through the next twenty years.

The Long Now Foundation is dedicated to long-term thinking. I’ve been a member for quite a few years now …which, in the grand scheme of things, is not very long at all.

One of their projects is Long Bets. It sets out to tackle the problem that “there’s no tax on bullshit.” Here’s how it works: you make a prediction about something that will (or won’t happen) by a particular date. So far, so typical thought leadery. But then someone else can challenge your prediction. And here’s the crucial bit: you’ve both got to place your monies where your mouths are.

Ten years ago, I made a prediction on the Long Bets website. It’s kind of meta:

The original URL for this prediction (www.longbets.org/601) will no longer be available in eleven years.

I made the prediction on February 22nd, 2011 when my mind was preoccupied with digital preservation.

One year later I was on stage in Wellington, New Zealand, giving a talk called Of Time And The Network. I mentioned my prediction in the talk and said:

If anybody would like to take me up on that bet, you can put your money down.

Matt was also speaking at Webstock. When he gave his talk, he officially accepted my challenge.

So now it’s a bet. We both put $500 into the pot. If I win, the Bletchly Park Trust gets that money. If Matt wins, the money goes to The Internet Archive.

As I said in my original prediction:

I would love to be proven wrong.

That was ten years ago today. There’s just one more year to go until the pleasingly alliterative date of 2022-02-22 …or as the Long Now Foundation would write it, 02022-02-22 (gotta avoid that Y10K bug).

It is looking more and more likely that I will lose this bet. This pleases me.

It has been exactly six years to the day since I instantiated this prediction:

The original URL for this prediction (www.longbets.org/601) will no longer be available in eleven years.

It is exactly five years to the day until the prediction condition resolves to a Boolean true or false.

If it resolves to true, The Bletchly Park Trust will receive $1000.

If it resolves to false, The Internet Archive will receive $1000.

Much as I would like Bletchley Park to get the cash, I’m hoping to lose this bet. I don’t want my pessimism about URL longevity to be rewarded.

So, to recap, the bet was placed on

02011-02-22

It is currently

02017-02-22

And the bet times out on

02022-02-22.