Planny McPlanface - FY27

So I came across this post a few days ago, which was a good read, I highly recommend going and having a look.

Mia's Roundup 2025 - Mia's Blog

Now, after reading that, I realised I really liked the idea of having a 'personal stuff' plan for the year, but I also work in finance now and I need to get used to thinking in quarters, so I decided to write a plan for this financial year, FY2027. I'll do a check-in at the end of each quarter then hopefully a round-up at the end of the year, and I'll see how this goes.

So, before we get started, thanks Mia, and I'm sorry for partially stealing being inspired by your work!

An Introduction

I, like Mia, realised I've never really done a full introduction online. I tried with a post on Bluesky but it wasn't that good, and I suck at writing more than "platform engineer" and "bi 22 year old". So here's a proper whoami.

Hi. My name's Hayden, I'm 22, I'm a guy from the UK who has a borderline unhealthy relationship with computers and has done since he was like 8. I've been on the internet for the better part of 12 years now, for better or worse, and I've been building things with computers for roughly 14 years.

I've been online pretty much constantly since I was about 13, up to you whether or not that's messed up my development as I've grown up but I think I've done okay. I'm also a simulation games nerd, and have an ungodly amount of hours in flight sims and space sims like MSFS and Kerbal Space Program, more than even Steam lists.

I've had several engineering-based jobs since I was about 16, but I currently work as a Platform Engineer at a fintech company, Acquired. I also... don't know how to switch off, so I also end up programming or doing ops work in my free time too.

While this 'plan' will primarily be about my engineering 'wants', there'll be a few non-project-specific goals I wanna set out for myself, too. It'll be interesting to look back on this at the end of FY27 and see how far I got.

A quick recap of my current works

Currently, I have a few 'in-flight' projects that I don't touch as often as I ought to:

Lucid, a Red Hat Insights clone built as a self-hostable service for systems administrators who don't need RHEL but like the look of Insights and Satellite.

RKAN, a CKAN (KSP modding tool, not knowledge network) tool to generate mod specs and validate mods from GitHub built in Rust, mainly built to improve building mods with multiple variants. (currently in use by ballisticfox for the Sol mod suite)

A project for a new charity called Chronic But Thriving to provide them with software solutions to organisation that (hopefully) works nicer than endless spreadsheets and Word documents.

Cookware (formerly recipes.blue), an ATProto food collaboration platform. I invisioned it working like recipe.exchange but a little more social. This hasn't been touched in quite a while because of the UK being shit.

I also have a few non-'practical' things I need to address:

Finance. Candidly, I'm not happy with my financial situation currently. Recent events IRL have proven to me that I need a cushion that I currently don't have in case anything goes wrong, and I also have debts I want to wipe out.

Career. One of the things I've wanted to do for a little while is progress myself to a Senior role, which my company is broadly supportive of, but I've not taken many active steps to achieve that yet.

Certifications. I've been brushing up on my Red Hat knowledge recently with an aim to go for an RHCSA for RHEL 10, but RHCSA exams are expensive, and the training material is sparse, so I've not done much on that.

Health. I'm overweight. I know I'm overweight, and I want to do better. Luckily, I'm about to move into a place with an integrated gym, so with my wife's help, hopefully I can get more in shape soon.

The Plan

I'll start with the technical things, because they're easier to actually plan out.

Chronic Project

They're gonna need this project pretty quickly, so I'd like to have the MVP/v0 of the first part they want, a Resource Hub, released and tested by the end of Q1 this year. Frankly, I've dragged my feet with that, so this needs doing.

Lucid

Lucid is a tricky one to estimate, but I have a goalpost in mind.

By the end of Q2, I want Lucid to be in a position where you can register a server with it, have some general facts periodically uploaded (things like kernel version and package set), and generally get a sense for the 'state' of a server.

My stretch goal here is being able to trigger compliance scans with OpenSCAP and then view them in the web UI, making it more than just an inventory tool.

RKAN

My goal with RKAN is to have the validation rules aligned completely with what NetKAN will provide by the end of Q2. I don't have much time to spend on this project, but it's one I do want to make as nice as I can.

Why am I setting so much time? CKAN does a lot of validation of the actual mods themselves, checking for things like using ModuleManager patch syntax without declaring a dependency on ModuleManager.

Cookware

Cookware is a hard one to plan to be honest. I'd like to get it to a point where I could deploy it for public use and have it at least help with recipe discovery, but the issue with that is that I don't want to comply with the UK's Online Safety Act, and I certainly don't feel like getting fined as much as Ofcom would try to fine me for non-compliance... So maybe making publically-accessible social media sites is off the cards for me right now.

That said, if I change my mind, getting it to a point where I have a good handle on what the schema should be will be a great start there, and building out recipe ingestion and display in a way that'll work nicely on all screen sizes would be good.

So, with the technical things out of the way, let's move on to the non-technical. These are far harder to plan out, so they'll be a little more nebulous.

Let's start with finances. I think where I'd like to get to is that I have at least a £500 cushion by the end of Q3, and I'd like to also have reduced my debt by half. That way I'm in a good position to continue on that path into FY28. That's a pretty simple one.

Career-wise, I'm working with... well, work, to figure out what a development plan for myself would be to move towards a senior role. I know my soft skills are pretty much my only major blocker on this path, but they're possibly the hardest for me to develop. In particular I think I need to work on the business-mindedness side of things.

I struggle with communicating business value for technical things, and my thought process often begins at the technical side, not at the business side, so trying to create thoughts I should have had from the get-go is tricky. I need to improve that, and hopefully by the end of the year, I'll be in a position where at least 50% of my 'decisionmaking' is done business-first at work. That feels relatively achievable, but we'll see where I land there.

As for certifications, I'd like to spend this FY working on my RHCSA knowledge. I trained myself for the RHSA back when RHEL 8 was the latest version, so I expect a lot of what I learned will need to be updated for the RHEL 10 era, especially with modularity being nuked from orbit.

What I'm not going to do right now is plan out anything health-related. I don't want to suggest impossible change plans for myself that I can't stick to, and I don't have the time right now to sit and think it through properly, so I'll probably either update this post at a later date or lay out the plan in a quarterly update post or something like that.

I think, all in all, that's a decent setup for myself for the next year, and there's plenty in there to do. I know I want to travel this year a bit, but I'm moving into a more expensive place and that's gonna kind of kerbstomp how much I can afford to do for the year, but we'll see.

Conclusion

So, that's my FY27 'roadmap'. It's not much, but hopefully it'll help me actually make some observable progress this year. Or at least... some progress I observe.

Thanks for reading, sorry again to Mia for absolutely yoinking your shit, and I'll see you at the end of Q1.

If you feel generous and want to send me a small gift for any of the things I've worked on or am working on, I do have a ko-fi over at ko-fi.com/haydenuwu.