As the year 2024 comes to an end and the new year 2025 is about to begin, I want to take this opportunity to recap the last year for HortusFox.

And I have to say it was a really great year! 

I've published so many updates and added new features, so the project grew really big. Thanks to the community who has been very supportive to this leafy project.

I remember at the beginning of the year, HortusFox did still have the old design. There were significant less features and still many bugs. Now, many months later, the project got a new look and many, many more features to make your plant parenting more easy and enjoyable. 

And there is more to come! The next version 4.0 will be released next year, in 2025 and there are great things to come! I really hope we can finally manage to implement the recurring tasks and other scheduling functionality as this was requested early on, but unfortunately didn't come into existence so far.

It was also a really great experience getting so much support by the community! When starting the project, I definitely didn't expect this. And it's overwhelming. Creating software is a very creative and logical process that is very fascinating and satisfying. And when other people really find it useful what you do, then this is really a great thing. 

I also got to know great people in the field. Specifically I want to name Ethan Sholly, who supported the project in such great ways, by his selfhosted newsletter and website and also by inviting me into a podcast episode of This Week in Selfhosted. It was a great experience being a guest co-host and I'm really looking forward to the next time.

I also want to name Dan Brown, the creator of BookStack, who - despite being very busy as a full-time opensource developer - always responded to my questions and gave me great advices with the daily struggles of an opensource dev. 

I am so thankful for both of these guys. I'm also thankful for the active community, creating issues, PRs and generally supporting the project on various platforms such as discord or social media.

Also greetings to DB Tech and Janis Kelemen who showed their appreciation to the project multiple times, which I am really thankful of!

I'll see you all next year and I'm really looking forward for the next big release of HortusFox, which is planned to come either in January or February.

I wish you all wonderful holidays and - as a german saying goes - nice sliding into the new year!