A Year in Retrospect: The Results of 2023

The year 2023 was quite complicated, though filled with events. I will leave aside politics and the situation in the world and try to understand what the past year has brought for me personally.

In the programming side of things, I learned Nuxt 3, and moved my blog from Eleventy. At work there were a lot of challenges related to Vue 2, Nuxt 2, and legacy code. I also migrated a large pet project from Drupal 8 to 10 and started solving programming exercises on LeetCode in the mornings.

In the past year, I have read and listened to about 60 books and about two hundred podcasts on topics varying from tech to art. It's worth noting that I mostly listen to fiction audiobooks while walking with my dog and while Nordic walking. By the way, my wife and I also tried Nordic walking for the first time this year.

Also, this year I started to study foreign languages more seriously — to train English pronunciation (I have no major problems with the language itself, I am able to watch movies and read books fluently). I tried different applications and finally settled on ELSA Speak.

This year I started to learn Chinese. The language itself and the writing system are interesting. I can't say that I've made much progress in it — 15–30 minutes a day is not enough for such a complex language, but learning it turned out to be a good exercise for my brain. I tried different applications for learning, and finally settled on Super Chinese.

Also, this year, I got 2 new musical instruments: 6-string guitar Inpector Katana and jaw harp (bass variant). I haven't encountered jaw harps before, it's interesting to learn to play it. According to my first impressions — it's not very difficult.

Among the significant events was the purchase of a mirrorless camera and several lenses. I had some experience in film photography as a kid, but over time it was forgotten. Now I'm starting to recapture it all and shoot interesting images.

With a new camera I started shooting guitar videos. Before that, I was shooting on my Samsung phone. I figured out how to set the light, bought different lighting equipment, switched from Kdenlive to DaVinci Resolve for video editing.

Here are my personal summary of the year. The year was interesting, and it adds motivation for new achievements and challenges. Let's see what the year 2024 will bring.