Alternate titles I almost ran with:

• “Party Like a Sysadmin”
• “Patch Notes for Turning Older”
• “A Birthday Without Balloons (or Sanity)”
• “All I Got for My Birthday Was Git Merge Conflicts”
• bday-shenanigans-sike-its--project-work-again.md (yes, that’s real)

Another year older. Not sure what that’s supposed to mean anymore.

Another revolution around the sun, another markdown file. Didn’t throw a party. Didn’t go out. Didn’t even log into Xbox. I did, however, throw commits, logs, curses, and maybe a few keyboard shortcuts that broke VS Code. What started as a birthday quickly morphed into a quiet, coffee-optional code jam that lasted three days straight. I got exactly three birthday messages (shoutout to the loyal fam), fell asleep somewhere in the early morning after being up since Friday, and spent the rest of the day chasing bugs instead of joy.

You know how some people blow out candles? I debugged a CI/CD pipeline and forgot to eat.

Some birthdays are for reflection. This one was for CSS breakpoints and storage permissions. And while I didn’t celebrate traditionally, I did leave myself a strange digital time capsule: a resume site, a working visitor counter, and an easter egg button that might get me hired… or institutionalized. TBD.

But hey, if I’m still here next year, I’m keeping the same energy — maybe with a better API and slightly fewer existential monologues.

I spent the day working on my site—same thing I’d been doing for 72 hours straight. I thought maybe I’d finish it by midnight, wrap a bow on it and call it my birthday gift to myself. That didn’t happen. Turns out there’s always another button to wire up, another bug to squash, another weird Azure error to decode.

But that’s okay. In some way, it was the most me birthday I could’ve had—quiet, obsessive, driven by vision, unfolding one line of code at a time.

Birthdays haven’t really meant much to me in a long time. No cakes, no crowds, no Instagram posts. Just another mark on the timeline. But this one still mattered—because I was building. And for now, that’s enough.

Addendum: “Birthday Recap, Now with 90% More Existential Dread”

Look, I’m not trying to win Sad Boy of the Year, but let’s just say…
This wasn’t exactly a highlight reel moment.

No parties. No surprises. No “wow, you made it another year!” speeches.
Just a few messages from the people that still tolerate me and then radio silence.
Not even a cupcake. I would’ve taken a Little Debbie.

And still—still—I stayed up hoping I could slap a finished badge on my site by the end of the day like that would magically make me feel accomplished. It didn’t. I just fell asleep in the morning sun like some broke tech vampire who codes instead of drinks blood. (Would drink blood if it came with dental.)

I don’t really do birthdays anymore. Haven’t for years. They just feel like annual reminders that time keeps moving and somehow I’m still stuck in the tutorial level of life—unemployed, broke, and building projects like I got venture capital breathing down my neck when it’s really just anxiety and regret.

But hey—progress is progress, even if no one’s watching.

So if you’re out there and your birthday sucks too, just know you’re not alone. I’m right there with you, humming “Happy Birthday” into the void and debugging my self-worth one Git push at a time.

Happy birthday to me, I guess.

–MW