2022
Happy I made it another year. 🎆
It's hard to put into words what I feel about this year as it still doesn't make much sense to me. The war in Ukraine took everyone, including me by surprise. And the conflict is still ongoing. Just hope it ends soon on Ukraine's terms because this aggression can't stand in the future.
Towards end the year, ChatGPT was released and it's magic. It does spit some things that aren't true with confidence and you have to be wary of it but you can clearly see the potential as the tech improves. And you can do queries that use real time datasets and not some 2021 year fixed training set.
I currently query it from Telegram bot and plan to build some things on top of this tech. One idea is for parsing out the responses and crafting study plans for LA as gateway until LA tech is sufficient enough to curate it well. I still dream of the future where AI crafts optimized learning paths for you based on what you know already and have seen. I hope that future comes next year already, I will do my best to make it happen. I am nearly there.
I like the idea of setting themes for next year. My theme for 2023 is similar to last year. Proper focus on goals I have set and health, family above all. Just these 3 things, no travelling or seeing the world or anything like this. Just want to get my life in order and help my family as much as possible financially or otherwise.
Next year, I also want to get heavy into mushroom growing. I found plenty of books to read. Will study them hard, take many photos. My parents have a nice greenhouse in Spain that I plan to use. Was even thinking of building my own water sprinkler . Write some embedded code, do the whole thing with wiring and tubes. The greenhouse is already used to grow things like tomatoes and cucumbers and other things so I want to study how to grow things efficiently in general. Biology and gardening is going to be my favorite hobby and personaility going forward.
On tech side, I settled on a stack I want to pursue deeply. It's Solid for all web based UI. Everything glued together with Deno, served on the edge or ran as scripts. I plan to build many desktop apps but mainly LA with Tauri so I will need to study Rust in more depth. Go is still great but I realized Deno is enough for my use cases at least for now. Go is still quite verbose for my liking although I see value in it. Oh and I want to go through Point Free catalogue and build proper iOS SwiftUI app. Busy year. And exciting.
Music
Volt sadly doesn't do year overviews.
2 songs I truly loved this year are After Hours & In My Mind.
But in general my Likes playlist is a treasure trove of great songs. Any time I play it on shuffle, I am happily surprised.
Movies/Series
I'm happy I continued writing all my monthly look backs and usually mention things I liked watching/listening in each entry. But from top of my mind, from series, I liked Andor, House of Dragon, Severance & finishing Better Call Saul.
And from movies, I liked Batman, Top Gun: Maverick, Bullet Train, Avatar 2 (all saw in cinema). And All Quiet on the Western Front, Barbarian, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Black Phone, One Day, The Banshees of Inisherin & Glass Onion.
Trakt & Letterboxd makes writing these overviews easy.
Nice things I added
Started using Warp as my terminal. Together with Fish Shell.
Moved my personal site to Solid and generally love everything about it now for building reactive UIs. Looks like this now but I plan to make many changes to it soon.
Use Height now for all my project tracking. Although I do wish for Height like tool built on top of GitHub issues. Use Height to manage how I allocate time in terms of projects, goals, long term focuses.
Also discovered Tauri. Still bad at Rust but for now it creates lightweight windows on the desktop which is what I care about.
The other big thing that truly started to pay dividends is moving my 2 Twitter tabs with my main feed & my secondary list into separate Safari Technology Preview app. I then have spacebar + k binding to open it. It's nice separation as I use my main Safari window for only productive work. Solving my problems one by one.
I do still visit HN, Lobsters, GitHub etc. and I need to cut this time down massively. Reason I do is that a lot of that content gets indexed into this wiki and I fear it will be hard to retrieve it later especially from likes of Reddit, on HN, I can search/parse historical data. On GitHub too, I can write crawler for all stars/repos etc. that my following graph has and index it, compare to what's already in the database etc.
In any way, next year I hope this problem gets solved fully so I spend majority of the day actually fully solving problems instead of semi automated indexing. But I do find it enjoyable in some ways as I can watch a video/talk in background as I do it. Plus I get many fancy ideas as I encounter new repos/articles.
I should be more mindful going forward in 2023. I'm 27 now. Not great, not terrible.
Another thing I started doing is I researched what good skin care actually is. Difference between cleanser, moisturizer, serums. Why each one exists, what order to use etc. Settled on mostly products from Geek & Gorgeous and so far I love how it makes my skin feel.
Also researched more into nutrition, exercises. I was already mindful of not overdoing it on sugary drinks, chocolates and generally non natural foods.
I remember not liking avocados at some point when I first came to NL but now love them so much. True super food that's healthy and generally goes well with everything. Mostly I try start my days with omelette on bread with avocado, some sauce and tomatoes.
I also am trying to perfect that nutrient dense shake. It's actually not easy to make something that's tasty in such small quantity that I can drink. When I first found out about existence of shakes, I made shakes so thick it wasn't a drink, you had to actually eat whatever came from the blender. 😺
Well, for now I did find this company, Nuzest that seems to be doing nice blends for both micro nutrient mixtures and plant proteins. It's much cheaper than Athletic Greens that's so heavily advertised by likes of Huberman whose podcast I did enjoy this year.
I noted all my nutrition and supplement routine in this wiki.
But yes other than that and the mindless war that's happening 2022 wasn't a bad year for me. I also spent a lot of time in Spain where my parents live together with my younger brother, sister and my 2 dogs and 3 cats. Love them all a lot. ♥️
Setbacks
Many months I did have nearly 0€ on the account. Mostly due to unforeseen expenses as I support my family on a single salary and few donations I do get each month. Truly thankful for each one. ♥️
I also have some health issues I need solved. Just didn't have enough money for surgery yet, trying to save up. And hopefully release more paid things of my own to get me to that goal.