2023

2023 is over, and I figured this is a great opportunity to look back onto what I accomplished during that time!

Miscellaneous

One of the biggest changes this year certainly was getting a job as a full-stack developer in Seoul. Even though there is a long list of things to complain about (which seems to grow by the day), I am nevertheless glad to finally be able to do what I want to and make a living with it. Professionally I grew a lot over the last year, and for the better or worse, most of it can be attributed to my own eagerness and perseverance. It still bothers me from time to time that I did not make as much progress on computer science fundamentals as I intended to, but actually, I think this is nothing to be too surprised about. There's just still a lot to learn. Besides, I found quite a liking for the Unix philosophy and Bash scripting. This may come as a surprise to some, but learning Bash and writing some useful utilities just for myself was particularly fun. On top of that, I came to really like Makefiles.

The second biggest change this year - a more personal one - was without a doubt getting married. Besides the wedding itself, the preparations took up a big chunk of my time this year, even though my wife selflessly did most of the work. The happier I am to report that the wedding was a great success and lots of fun, not just for me, but for everyone involved. Growing as a person, not just by myself, but together as a married couple, is something I am eagerly looking forward to in the coming years.

In terms of things that happened this year, I think mentioning starting to work in Tech and getting married already does its justice. Still, there are two other small lessons I learned that I want to mention anyway. In a certain way, I already knew this before, but I realized I do miss home more than I was ready to admit before. Speaking Korean every day can feel exhausting from time to time. Besides getting better at writing software, I spent a nontrivial amount of time learning to configure and suit it to my liking. One of the most important takeaways, though, is simply that the choice of your editor or shell doesn't matter too much anyway. Yes, being able to edit text seamlessly with just a few keystrokes is fun and may even be faster and more efficient, but it does not really make me a better engineer. What makes me a better software engineer instead are the character traits that brought me onto the path to learning these tools in the first place. The urge to get to know how things work under the hood. The perseverance to stick with things that can be uncomfortable and pretty challenging at times. Navigating text via Vim motions and knowing some of the particulars of ZSH's completion system not so much. Of course, I already knew this before, but I guess I had to spend some time to get to fully understand this.¹

Reading

Coming into this year, I did not have a fixed goal in mind about how many books I wanted to read.² Due to logistical reasons, most, if not all, of my reading this year happened on my phone. According to my iBooks library, I read five books this year, with a sixth one not finished yet. I read a couple of other books online as well, but I doubt the number of books read would be much higher even if I included these. The most remarkable reads were "The Dream Machine" by M. Mitchell Waldrop and "Oceanic" by Greg Egan. I intend to spend less time online and a bit more time reading books in the coming year.