Christmas update on FA, my IRL affairs and other news

After a fairly unnecessary long pause from usual updates I finally bring you yet another one; most certainly and totally not caused by my horrible memory and constant postponing!

First of all, I would like to open with some rather excellent news: Both my health and current job have been stable and going well in the last couple months without any significant issues, blunders or problems. However, my work has been a bit more demanding to get settled into than I originally anticipated and therefore required quite a lot of focus and effort from my end of things to make sure everything ended up working well. All this coupled together with me slowly ending my other, business, freelancing projects from my previous “era of life”, simply turned out more demanding than I originally anticipated and took far more time to properly sort out and finally leave behind me.

This brings me to everyone’s favorite part, where I thank all of you for your continuous support: And it absolutely isn't any different this time either! Let be known far and wide, that I still full-heartily and humbly appreciate all the support that all of you provide both me and our community - Be it by direct donations, helping to keep FA and the Discord server alive or by simply mentioning the app anywhere else to any friends/community/etc. All of your efforts have been amazing, I still very much appreciate them and therefore deeply thank you for your incredible support throughout all these years, both the good ones and even the less fortunate ones!

To conclude the report on my IRL happenings: I managed to pay off almost all my previous debts, missed health and social insurances, their penalty fees and all other kinds of bothersome things that previously managed to pile on top of each other due to my former bad health and lack of decently paid work - Luckily with all that in the past now, I am about two months away from paying off the last couple remaining ones and after that, it should be smooth sailing.

With all these topics out of the way, the time has come to give you a summary of how FA’s rewrite is going: Due to all the things mentioned above, stuff has been going rather slowly, but somewhat steadily in the last couple months. Multiple important additions to the functionality of the program have been successfully implemented (automated testing, translations, better error handling, code optimizations, etc.) and the new program is slowly starting to finally take some proper shape and form. I sadly don’t have any ETA yet, but I recently got back to slowly adding more and more to the code as my IRL job and previously mentioned hurdles require less and extra time from me; let us all cross our fingers that it will keep going like that and that next year is going to be even better in this regard!

This leaves me with only one closing thought: I want to wish the best possible merry Christmas, happy holidays and an awesome New year!

P.S. The Christmas-y Fantasia image has been brought to you by my beloved Raashe! :)