30/12/2020: Where have I been?

[Ravenslofty]

My general goal for this blog is for fairly well-edited technical writing. This particular post isn't it - it's actually quite depressing - and you're welcome to ignore it if you need to. But it's my blog, and I feel I need to write this for myself as much as anything.

So what was my sudden disappearance for? Mental health issues, mostly.

An incredibly abbreviated guide is that at the end of August my best friend of 8 years died from a rare form of prostate cancer. He wasn't even the first person I've lost to cancer, and that kind of thing messes with your head while you process it.

As much as anything, the articles I wrote before were a distraction from his death; with the university year starting up I tried putting it out of my mind to focus on my studies. These things often creep up on you though, and at the end of November I finally admitted I needed to take some time to process it, as I was struggling with university work.

So now I'm working for Antmicro on open FPGA tooling (presently Yosys, but it looks like I'll have the opportunity to work on the openfpga project too). Maybe I'll do a write-up of that if people are interested.

I didn't entirely intend to take a hiatus - I think more sources of technical writeups can only be a good thing - but I hope my readers will understand.