Dec 26, 2023

2023 - Year in review | Readings

Year after year, I get to look back on my goals. It’s a bit of an humbling experience as I see how much I didn’t do and need to reflect back on why and what changed since then.

Looking at the first article of the year I got the following goals:

Keep on scheduling the tasks on the calendar
Daily 500 words
Read Rust book
Finish advent of code in Rust
Develop a research program in Rust
Develop app to remind who to keep in touch
Setup/join a monthly board game

These seems quite reasonable.

Keep on scheduling the tasks on the calendar

I set out to be more organized and I’ve been able to keep up on this point. I’ve done more week updates, I’ve used google calendar to make sure my life was organized. On top of this, I’ve moved between tools to write my private notes and I’ve come to one conclusion. I want to have an offline first experience with 100% control of my data. To this end I’ve switched to Obsidian although the logseq open source model is a nicer one. On top of this, I’ve switched the stack of my personal blog from gatsby to astro. It was quite a seamless transition (~2 hours) and I think it’s thanks in part to deciding on using only markdown files for my content.

Daily 500 words

On my writings, the week review has been a good mechanism to keep track of my work but I still would love to write more. I’ve fulfilled, more or less the 500 words thresholds (have written a lot more private notes) but I’d like to give more back to the community.

Read Rust book Finish advent of code in Rust

I started the year very keen on doing more in Rust. But something I find is that I tend to get bored if I don’t have a more specific goal. Rust is a tool, so why use it? Doing the advent of code is a nice challenge but aside from practicing for interviews there hasn’t been much in doing this. However if my side projects required some speedups… Then I truly think it would be a great motivation. So, I’ve started to write donw on quick side projects and I’ll be sure to look for when Rust is a good fit. Probably this means I’ll be merging code challenges with side projects.

However, coming back to reading rust book I have to say that I’ve read both Flink and Learning Spark. Those are much more useful for my data work and I’ll be revisiting them both

Develop a research program in Rust

When I wrote this I had a very specific side project in mind. After doing a first version I found that the version I had created in Python was good enough. On top of this the project was put on hold 😅. This was a good exercise where we saw that we shouldn’t pre-optimize on the stack. Specially if the requirements aren’t 100% understood.

And this is why I setup the semester logic. I want to improve on multiple topics and the semester gives the year a nice pace. Looking back I think a big difficulty I had was that I had two worlds I kept at the same time. My work on Typescript backend and the side projects. It’s just too much.

As I decided on leaving more time for both family and friends I had to give up somewhere and I guess the side projects were ones. I didn’t provide much talks (the meetup is the first one since the dbt presentation). Looking into the semester I think the writing/education has to be it’s own subject.

On a up note, I’ve kept the social interactions. I have a stable group to play DnD and also to play soccer. Both are quite fun and I feel it brings some nice balance to my life.

Develop app to remind who to keep in touch

This was another nice idea which I still haven’t picked up. Why? I’m not sure. I was able to socialize a bit more but this is still relevant. I have too many friends dear to me I don’t keep in touch enough. But I’ll again leave this in the bag of ideas.

Setup/join a monthly board game

This is the final one which has nothing to do with the rest. As I’ve kept working remotely I’ve wanted to make sure I went out some time to be with either family or friends. I’m quite happy that not only I got together monthly but even better I got weekly! This and the soccer games have improved my mental health by a whole degree.

Moving forward

The year review is great but as I’ve been saying, I’m trying to move to a semester mentality. I might even go with a trimester after reviewing the semester itself (probably next article). So, I think I can consider the review of 2023 done, I’ve done most of what I initally set out to do (I honestly wasn’t counting on it) and the things i didn’t do were either because I made a decision in favor of things more dear to me.

Readings

This month I read a couple of non technical books to close the year. From below, for a total of 19 books I got to read 2 highly technical books, 3 political ones, 2 somewhat technical (finances and phoenix project) and 12 fantasy (missing the 2 from the wheel of time in the image below).

Aside from this I’ve done a bit of article reading as show below. I have 105 articles so I guess I’ll be doing a bit of trimming after closing the semester.

So, now I need to work hard on finishing the semester (advent of code, meetup talk and São Silvestre run) and I’ll then move to the next one!

See ya! 👋🏽👋🏽👋🏽