Moving Forward

Around the beginning of June/Towards the end of May I announced that my father passed away. Depending on the social channel I communicated this on/ Discord server, the date this was communicated on could have been vastly different. This was first disclosed to my very close friends, and then LinkedIn. Then it was posted to various projects I was involved with. To some this was completely out of nowhere, for others they may have seen changes in my behavior or knew directly my Dad was not doing well. To my knowledge this has been revealed to most communities except for my Discord bot project.

When this happened, my first priority was family and getting myself together. Its hard to describe into words how I felt. The first few weeks, was filled with crying, and flashbacks of memories I had not recalled in years to even decade old memories. I did not try to work during this, I immediately took Bereavement and took some additional time off. It was filled with lots of uncertainties and things to figure out. The last 2-3 months have involved figuring things out, in terms of moving forward. During this time I did not work on any of my projects and was solely working on a path forward for myself, and the family.

Admittedly, I did not know how long this process would take. For months, we would figure something out and something new would need to be taken care of. This was the case for the entirety of June, and continued until the middle of July where there finally seemed to a light at the end of the tunnel. I kept this very quiet and did not tell anyone, outside of some select family members.

I am glad to say as of today, I believe that things have been figured out to return to normal. This was the case around a week and a half ago, but I had some pending stuff that I wanted to see how it would develop before hitting the resume button.

Before I go further. I want to address and acknowledge there were times these past few months where I may have gone overboard or may have rubbed off the wrong way, likely due to a lot of what was happening in the past few months. I kept a lot of this to my chest, and even then some of the details are not revealed here (for what I hope are good reasons). I did step away from some conversations and voice frustrations at times. If anyone was bothered by something I said in the last few months, please reach out and let me know if you still have pending issues.

If anything from the past few months has shown me anything, it is that 2025 is going to be the year of change. Besides what was mentioned above, I will finally be moving my office outside of my Bedroom and within the next couple of months will have plenty of isolation between the two and not be in the same small room for more than half the day. I suspect this will cause stress to be significantly less. If that doesn't this next change will. This will also be the year that I am graduating, and this has been a multiyear roller coaster that involved a Pandemic, 2 cornea transplant surgeries, and 2 different college. I will be graduating from WGU at the end of the year. I am immensely thankful for the future and anticipate that this will be a huge weight lifted from my shoulders.

These changes have made me begin evaluating several things in my life, from financial outlook, to what I want to do with projects long term. This even made me start looking at what goals I want to focus on at work and for my career in general. 2025 also marked the end of the training period for my first trainee at work. When I had started, I had never imagined that I would be training someone. Here I am this year training a second person, and hoping to get to a Senior Engineer position at some point. So quite a lot of change huh?

In June I was fortunate to still be able to go to the first all hands meetup in Munich Germany for Platform.sh, despite all that happened. This was the first time where I got to meet all of my coworkers regardless of location. Instead of having a regional meetup like we normally do, we all were in Munich! I'm happy that I was able to meet a majority of my coworkers in support, along with my other coworkers in Customer Success, Engineering, Ops, and more. It was a refreshing experience being able to connect and talk til Midnight in the lobby of the Westin Grand Munich about anything. Particularly I enjoyed talking a lot with my coworker Matthias (Your awesome Matthias!) and Andrew (my fellow Midwesterner in support and partner in crime when it comes to customer hi-jinks).

At Munich the conversations and changes that were being discussed by leadership was very promising, and made me the most hopeful I have out of the three years in the company (not to say that I wasn't hopeful about our mission before hand). I'm excited to talk about what we are cooking up later this year!

Some folks at Munich may have seen me missing for certain chunks of hours, usually at random. This was either for sleep, or having to deal with business at home (despite the massive time difference). I believe I only brought this up with a few. I have no regrets about going to Munich. I appreciate people trying to push me to do other things as well, even if my physical capacity was limited and I appreciate folks putting up with it.

Last Friday was my third year anniversary of joining Platform.sh. It has been an exhilarating experience and I do not regret taking the leap of faith to join Platform.sh. The experience I have gained in the last three years is unimaginable. The friendships I have forged with my coworkers from all around the world and the customers that I have had the privilege to work with is unreal. I am extremely grateful that I get to work with a world class team everyday. With the recent conversations in Munich from leadership, I have never been as hopeful in the companies future as I am today.

Platform is a company that I can see myself at for a long time, because of the endless possibilities of things to do within the company. I'm not just limited to Customer Success. I see myself at the company long term. Three years is the longest I have worked at a company professionally. Sure there may be projects that I have been a part of long term, but never have I been with a company this long. Nothing but a bright future ahead.

The past few months, I have been spending time with family, and communicating much more actively with family. Last week I went to Buffalo, MI to visit family at the lake, and had a blast. This highlighted more of an important need to spend time with family, and I hope to achieve this with more trips to Indianapolis.

Now lets get to the meat and potatos, projects. For many years now I have been working on three projects and have dealt with burnout along the way.

The past three years have had ups and downs, but with recent reflections I am not going to be taking action to ensure that I enjoy the work I am doing again.

Recent reflections have made me come to the realization that I want to get more involved with Software Engineering, and coding. Not just for a hobby level, but professionally. I've known for some time that some of my projects are not to the standards I would like them to be. Some of them have been around since I started actively writing code that is used back in 2018 (I was coding before this date). I want to start again, and write production level systems and Applications to the standards I want and start building the knowledge and passion I had back in 2018. This means making some changes to some projects, and clarifying the status of them.

DeviantCord was created in 2018 from a dare from a friend, that nobody would make a Discord bot that interacted with DeviantArt. Back then, my passion was sky high for it, being an active user of the site for a around a few months. I worked so many hours on the bot daily, and I loved doing it. This would go on for around a year and a half, when Discord.py, the library that the bot relied upon announced it was ceasing development.

This would start a multiple year journey to get it ported over to Javacord, along with multiple major reworks to only have Javacord announce they would cease development at the end of the year near completion.

During this time, I did not have the same drive or passion as I did when I first created it. A lot of legacy code was ported over from its Python counterpart, and I would argue some of the code is not very good. It should have been a complete rewrite rather than a shitty port of it to Java.

While I do believe at this stage the code is stable (some of the problems we had have been tested out during this 2 month adventure, where I had staging versions of DeviantCord running). My intent at this point is to still release DeviantCord, and do bug fixes to test for Beta and get a stable build released. Then do maintenance fixes and bug fixes only. I do not anticipate that I would work on new features. Why?

With Javacord's ceasing to provide fixes at the end of the year, including future breaking changes, I do not want to invest too much time into DeviantCord. I briefly explored porting it over to Kord (Kotlin) and did announce that we would, but I am abandoning that plan. This would involve learning Kotlin, and while I would be able to retain a good amount of code. It would still have the legacy code and design from the Python version. It would likely be another bastardization of the Python and Java version. However the next section makes it much more clear why I am doing this.

This has been in the idea stage for a while (at least a year). This started with a conversation with a good buddy of mine on Discord, IBP. He was complaining about YAGPDB. Around that time I found from a insider within the Kord Development server that Discord was cooking something up with MessageComponents/Interactions.

This made me start thinking of an idea of Bot that was not limited to DeviantArt, but multiple purposes. DeviantArt functionality could be a part of the bot, along with other potential ideas for bots features I've had, bundled into one bot. The possibilities are endless.

This project would allow me to satisfy my crave to create an reliable system, and in all likelihood bring back my passion to working on Discord Bots again. I'm thinking of writing the bot in Golang due to GoRoutines, and wanting to learn the ins and outs of golang for the past year. When I wrote DeviantCord, I wasn't too confident with Python (C# was my strongest language at the time). But I fell in love with it and persevered. It should bring back a similar feeling. This project will not be involved with Elaztek, and will be under the Errite Softworks name. It is my intention, once I get DeviantArt functionality implemented on Blue Azure, I will cease development of DeviantCord. I hope to have more details about BlueAzure as we get through development. BlueAzure has not started any development yet.

Out of all my projects, DonationStore was making the most progress. When my Dad was going through health issues, I was still working on it. It was only when he passed away that I ceased work on it. Work on it will resume, to fix some issues with bundling releases, fix some issues on the site.

There is also some final walkthrough's with the owner Halo on the AdminCP to ensure that its consistent with our vision since the latest release introduced some changes. Once the walkthrough has concluded, we will immediately allow for current customers to download and test the new release. At which point I will start work on getting some of the billing stuff setup on the site, to allow for those who have not purchased the product to purchase and test it.

We are going to be abundantly clear during the test period things may not work as intended. Some bugs may pop up. We will be very transparent in the DonationStore Discord server regarding bug fixes, as well as updates for the project moving forward.

Once testing has concluded and release has been made. We will be working on some new features and some quality of life fixes. After a fair bit, we will begin working on V3.0 of DonationStore which will bring a lot of new features, customization, for your DonationStore instance using the power of Wagtail. Halo and I are very excited about this and look forward to talking about this in the future.

This is probably one of the projects, I've felt guilty about lack of updates. Over the past 8 months I have been working with one of our team members on getting Episode 5 finished. I intend in the next couple of weeks to discuss the project to get things moving. As some of you may have seen within the last few weeks Silya did talk a bit on the Discord server about her situation. The work above is not impacted by her current situation, although work on Episode 6 and beyond may. We will be focusing on Episode 5 and getting that done, before planning for what may be ahead with Episode 6 and beyond.

Despite what was going on, I did submit a talk. As of right now I cannot talk (lol) about it. Details should be revealed in a week or so and will be announced here and on LinkedIn. I do also plan on submitting a talk to PyTexas for the Discord Meetup regarding Discord bots, that should be more casual. I plan on submitting that sometime next month.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read and I hope to see you all soon. Whether its at Platform, on Discord, or at a conference.

Michael Riley Jr.