2023 recap
Unfortunately, that’s a bad sign when you start a year review with the word unfortunately, but what can I do? Unfortunately, there is still no sign of the war ending. Most Ukrainians understand that If they give up, those who will survive occupation will go to die in a war with Georgia, Armenia, Moldova, Latvia, Kazakhstan, Finland, or you name it, under the Russian flag. And if someone hopes that by some miracle Russia will stop, well, it will not stop from the inside. Most Russians are okay with what is going on.
If you want to help Ukrainians, here is where you can do it
- There are many pets in the fighting area whose owners were killed or displaced. They need food and medical care. uanimals.org
- I know those guys from my motorcycle life in Ukraine. They were saving lives then and do the same now. motohelp.ua
- Those guys are risking lives saving others on the front line: hospitallers.life
- Most importantly, all of that does not make much sense if the army of Ukraine does not have enough rounds, warm clothes, vehicles, etc. prytulafoundation.org
What I did do this year?
Software:
This year I had no contributions to other projects but merged a few in my own. It was surprising that someone used my stuff and even wanted to improve it.
The list of software that I maintain is growing.
- BAR static site generator. Is in a super early stage, but this blog is a working demo.
- YAMD yet another markdown (flavor)
- Clink cross-platform URL cleaner.
- Cloudinary Rust API
- Serve a simple tool to serve static files over the network. This blog is a working demo.
All my side projects are now in Rust. Still getting in fights with the borrow checker now and then, but most of the time it is a butter-smooth experience.
The whole year I was using Neovim as my main IDE. I tried some of the prebuilt config distributions and settled on the AstroNvim with some tweaks of mine. The reason I got into it was rust-analyzer. I have not found a way to make it work with JetBrains stuff, and for some reason, I do not like vsCode. So far there are two things I still have not figured out:
- debugging. I know about dap and dap-ui. Just didn’t find time to figure out how to configure it.
- Autosave + autoformat brakes undo/redo and makes me crazy.
Oh yeah, and last month of a year I was busy with Advent of Code. I am still on day 17, but I am not planning to give up.
Adventures:
This year I managed to have two big adventures:
And a few small ones. Which is more than usual, but I like it and do not plan to stop. This year I tried multiday bikepacking. And looks like I am going to do more of it next year.
Music:
This was the most productive year for me as a musician. I recorded five tracks. At some point, I even started to think about releasing an album on vinyl, but haven’t found the inspiration/time to make enough tracks.
Paintings:
I really like how oil behaves on canvas, and would like to spend more time exploring it. But there are so many things to do and so little time, looks like one painting in a year is my pace.
Books:
I was so busy with everything else that there are only four books that I managed to finish this year:
- The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop
- Systems design interview by Alex Xu
- Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann
- Point and Line to Plane by Wassily Kandinsky
I want to read more fiction next year.
Work-related stuff:
This year I got promoted to a lead developer at Check24. And I thought that there would be no changes in my position for the next years. But a few months back my manager asked if I wanted to try myself in a team lead role and I said yes. Now I manage a team of three engineers and figuring out how to measure my productivity in a new role.
See you next year and happy holidays.