2023 has been a big year for me. I started a new phase of my life and I’ve done and learned so many new things. This post is a brief catalogue of my highlights of 2023, mostly so I can look back at this in the future.
The first half of 2023 was meant to be defined by entrance exams, but I found myself… not really caring. I spent all my time doing things I was interested in and not touching studies, and in the end barely managed to secure a seat that I was happy with.
Coding-wise, most of what I did was contributing to Files. I wasn’t actively working on anything of my own. I also made tsconverter, which is the first thing I’ve ever really shipped because of how ridiculously tiny it is.
However, the highlight has to be going out and meeting people for the first time. I attended a handful of tech meetups, and met some amazing people each time. Coolest of all was the 24-hour IRL hackathon with Shrish; that one event was too many ‘first times’ for me to list here! Now that I don’t have infinite free time, I won’t be able to do any of this nearly as often, but I definitely want to make meeting people a part of my life.
The second half of the year was of course defined by college. I’ve written about that in detail here. I’m at the tail-end of my semester now. I really like how compact each semester feels compared to school. The most interesting thing I’ve done here so far is join our CTF team - I’m finally starting to make good on my commitment to learn infosec. Second is probably attempting SIH, even though we weren’t successful.
It was also defined by shipping for the first time. I now have my website (not this website, gotta be inclusive to RSS readers!) and my recently released app Phobos as stuff I can show to people as stuff I’ve made. I have plenty more in the pipeline and I certainly hope I’m able to put those in a similar state too.
I started learning to play the guitar earlier this year and I stopped just a few months later. I lost all motivation after college started. I haven’t obtained a Ham radio license yet either, but that’s just blocked on things™ and I still fully intend on getting one as soon as possible.
There’s all the other miscellaneous things I’ve done and learned that are far too many to list here. Overall, I think 2023 has been the most productive year for me so far. Here’s hoping 2024 is even better.