I’ve seen a few bloggers do this so I thought it would be an interesting personal project, particularly given the amount of time I have for reflection given my current circumstances.

Introducing - My Life in Weeks.

The project is inspired by Life in Weeks at Wait But Why. I adapted the code that generated the project from Gina Trapani, which itself is a fork of code from Buster Benson.

It’s been an interesting exercise going back and seeing what I can actually find regarding dates for major events in my life. Since 2000, I have a digital record of most things, whether that be emails, calendar events or time-stamped photographs. Prior to 2000, however, it’s a little more tricky.

For instance, I’m really struggling to recall and find dates for places I visited when I was in the Navy in the 90s. I’ve added some events - pieced together from postcards I sent to my parents and a few photos I do have, but I’m missing far more than I’ve added. A deployment in late 1997 is well-photographed. Other than that, I tended to lose my camera on crazy nights out. I remember one time I lost my camera in the sea when stepping drunkenly from a boat on to the jetty.

I’ve also struggled to find any official records of port visits for the Royal Navy ships I was on. I can’t imagine why this would still be classified. It would take a lot more digging I think. A lot of archived newspaper clippings are behind paywalls. I’ll probably need to reach out to former shipmates, or trawl through the various Facebook groups.

My Life in Weeks includes where I lived (I’ve moved house a lot), where I’ve worked and major trips, in cases where I have dates. I’m still missing some holidays from the 90s. I haven’t bothered with weekends away. There were a lot of them - when we were in Australia, at least.

You may wonder how much it costs to create and host this little project. The answer is - nothing. The website is published on Netlify, which offer a free plan for personal use. The code is served from a personal GitHub repository - again free. The web server and code is open-source (i.e. free). Ok, you do need to purchase a domain name, but I already had darylhaines.com. For this project I simply created a sub-domain (CNAME) entry with my DNS provider. Easy peasy. Any time I want to update the entires, I simply make a change to a text file, push it using Git to my code repository. Netlify is set up to monitor the repository and automatically publish any changes. If only everything was this easy.