Here’s a look at what I’m up to right now as of January 26, 2025.
Sundance Film Festival
My wife and I are big movie fans. This will be our 7th year volunteering at the festival. We aren’t responsible for anything mission-critical. We basically get to work at a movie theater for a week a year, and in exchange get to watch a bunch of movies for free, and get a pass to explore the Festival.
Due to everything going on with the house (see below), we’re taking it easy this year. In 2023, I watched 15 films during the 10-day festival. I suspect this year that’ll be closer to 10.
You can check out which movies I’ve watched this year on Letterboxd.
New House!
In December 2024, we closed on a new house here in Salt Lake City! We moved here from Orlando in November of 2017 for work. As a progressive atheist who grew up by the beach, I didn’t expect to want to stay here long-term. What I found was a supportive community, a very liberal city in a red state, beautiful easy access to nature, medical marijuana, and a slower pace of life that we fully embraced.
During those years we’ve visited a bunch of cities to help us decide if we should move somewhere else. We considered Seattle, Portland, New York, Denver, Boulder, Chicago, DC, San Francisco and even international locations like Amsterdam, Edinburgh and Inverness.
Salt Lake City is far from perfect. At the state level, there’s a lack of support for women and trans rights. We’re effectively a theocracy, with all elected officials being faithful to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. You can’t get beer on tap above 5% (really).
We ran the numbers on buying versus renting. I fully assumed it’d lean towards renting and we’d stay where we are. We’re in a bit of weird place financially right now. We’re still drawing from funds after Code School was acquired. At our current pace that won’t last forever. We decided we’d rather run out of money in ~10 years with a house rather than ~15 years without one.
We’re fixing a few things before we move in on February 24th, a day before my wife and my 19th anniversary!
Fun
After the election, I changed my morning routine and switched from doom-scrolling to reading (well, trying to). This has meant 30 minutes to an hour of reading each morning!
I recently joined Bluesky with (seemingly) the rest of the developer community. If you’re on there, let’s connect! I’m @adamfortuna.com to match this site.
We’re also planning to adopt a dog! I started getting allergy shots earlier this year, and after 18 weeks, I’m now immune! We’re now on the lookout for a furry addition for our household.
I also upgraded my phone from an iPhone Xs to an iPhone 16 Pro Max. It’s notably faster, and I’ve already gotten used to the larger screen. I see why it’s hard to go back.
I’m playing through Celeste for the first time and loving it. It’s challenging, but every time I successfully complete a room I feel such a huge sense of accomplishment.
Programming
On Hardcover, I’m working on a major overhaul. We’re switching from using Next.js to using Ruby on Rails with Inertia.js. It’s a LOT of work given the 129 pages involved.
We’re nearly to 26,000 users, 250 subscribers, and 3.5 years in! Still a super fun project, and I’m confident we’ll be able to continue growing.
I recently posted on BlueSky about a few projects I aim to work on more, and as an excuse to spend less time on social media:
- Fix Minafi – It needs to be upgraded from Rails 6 and Webpacker to Rails 8 and Vite. It won’t even build right now, which means parts of the site are currently broken.
- Migrate my blog (this site) from Next.js to Astro. I’ll continue using Headless WordPress for the content.
- Migrate Minafi & this blog to Digital Ocean. Hardcover is migrating there too. I’d like to have everything in one place.
- Build a Minimalist Journal for iOS inspired by this approach
Each one of these will require learning a little more. I’ve never used Astro or Swift code, but Astro will be a lot easier to migrate to than learning native iOS apps. Learning how to develop iOS apps natively is one of my personal goals that keeps getting pushed back due to a lack of projects and prioritization.
Fitness
Now that I’ve mostly recovered from ACL surgery (July ’22), I’ve been exercising more. After working with an online personal trainer for 6 months, I’ve tweaked my fitness routine down to something relatively simple:
- Gym: 3x a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday)
- Cardio: 2x a week (Tuesday, Saturday)
- Walk 10k steps: On days I don’t work out. 6k steps minimum on days I do.
I switched from going to the gym at 8 a.m. to starting earlier, at 6 a.m. Combined with less time on social media, I’m not staying up as late and can start the day earlier.
I’ve also started taking walks after lunch each day, which puts me in a much better mood in the afternoon.
This schedule will surely change after we move into our new house.
Travel
2024 was the first year we traveled internationally since before COVID. We went to South Korea for 2 weeks in April, which was amazing.
More recently, we spent the end of October in Barcelona, Spain, followed by a cruise (Barcelona, Spain → Lisbon, Portugal → Porto, Portugal → Tangier, Morocco → Cadiz, Spain → Barcelona, Spain).
If you’re ever in Lisbon and enjoy shellfish, I encourage you to try Cervejaria Ramiro. You need reservations for the main restaurant, but there’s a walk-in version next door. We enjoyed shrimp, tiger shrimp, barnacles, clams and langoustines with a bottle of cava and a beer in one of our favorite meals ever. Thanks to Anthony Bourdain for the recommendation!
For once, we don’t have any travel scheduled for anytime soon. With a new house and dog in the cards, we’re allocating the foreseeable future to that. I have a penciled-in travel plan for 2026, though: work from Japan for a month. I’m continuing to learn Japanese (I took it in college), and I am excited to try my own foreign exchange program. 😂
Mental Health
2025 is shaping up to be quite a year. I remember in 2016-2020 I spent a lot of time on Twitter, taking in news from all angles all day long. I wanted to have my ear to the ground to know what new policies and rights were being taken away.
I still want to know those things to stand up to oppression when possible, but I don’t need to know right away. I’m switching from reading news sites to BlueSky, RSS Feeds and the Salt Lake Tribune.
What’s Next?
I’ve been trying to be more lenient when things are going perfectly. Schedules shift, but it’s better to make incremental progress on something than nothing.
Saying no to new projects is a priority now, in order to better focus on everything else.