Year in review — 2023

Following the tradition of reflection at the end of the year as usual. Last post can be found here. This is a public documentation of everything which went well, stuff which did not go well and everything in between.

Writing

• Started working on one of my most / if not my most ambitious writing projects called from scratch. It is a project on building everyday tech from scratch to have a deeper understanding & more mechanical sympathy.
• One interesting post on writing an ESlint rule from scratch, which did pretty well!
• Wrote a lot of notes on math, minimalism, one bag, key remapping, how bulk jobs should be handled etc.. follow me on Twitter where I post more notes.

Reading

Read 10 books. Best fiction was "Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow" and best non fiction was "Tell me how it ends". Did better than last year (I read 5 last year, so that bar's pretty low).

Code

Apart from the work related code at Refyne.

• A lot of code prototyping for from scratch. Its very hard to teach a concept with a good learning story or arc.
• Won runner-ups in Let's hack Bangalore hackathon run by Obvious. Was a lovely experience, wrote more about it over here.
• Worked with an NGO on parsing PDFs using Open AI. Was a fascinating experience and was positively mind-blown. Will use these APIs further in the products / projects I build.

Travel

• Coorg: the zostel here is beautiful and the people are amazing. It has a fireplace where people sing, dance and celebrate life. Its a pleasure to be here every single time.
• Allepy: a week-long trip. Kerala is beautiful and a week was just about enough to experience the endless beauty of this place. One of the best places to visit if you want to relax & wind down. Cafe Catamaran is a magical place, do visit.
• Varkala (solo): Been to lost hostel (near the helipad). Very cool folks, great vibe.
• Kolad (solo): the most peaceful place I've been to till now. I've been to the Zostel here. To reach the Zostel, you'll have to take a boat! Its located in the middle of a river! Sleeping on a hammock next to a river is bliss. Check it out!
• Goa: Was my first time at goa in my life. Went thrice this year. Goa although has been getting more and more main stream, the place has a magic which is hard to beat.
• Panchgani: Went paragliding. Awesome experience, highly recommended!

Others

• Learnt some card tricks & cardistry. Was super fun, will probably spend some time on this too in the next year.
• Started going to cubbon reads, loved it. Will start going more next year.

What did not go well

• Treks: None. Last year did two treks, this year it was zero. Need to get back up and do a couple this year.
• Running & fitness: Barely ran, mostly 2k's. Need to get back into fitness & running.

And that's a wrap! Here's to hoping all of us have great 2024!