Well... a lot of big things happened this year. But to understand the context, we also need to understand what went down last year, which was significant in its own way.
I often like to start my day by keeping myself abreast of interesting things in the world of computer programming. Often this means a visit to Hacker News or Lobsters. I somehow managed to come across Richard Startin's article about why he doesn't use Google Protocol Buffers for telemetry. Near the bottom, he has an aside about VarInts and shares a few tricks to produce them more efficiently.
It's been a long time coming, but I have bitten the bullet. My blog, once a fairly stodgy thing I hadn't updated in over 2 years has received a total redesign with a focus on extremely fast load times. My goal is function over form and I think I have delivered that. Of course, I did make some concessions to keep the format largely sane. But while my blog sat empty, many things have changed in my life.