Looking back at 2023 and forward to the new year
2023-12-29
During the time between the years as we call it here in Germany ("Zeit zwischen den Jahren"), everyone should and most of us actually are looking back at which goals we achieved in 2023, what didn't work out so well and the surprising developments nobody planned . This is also the ideal time to define goals and measurable milestones for new year and brainstorm potential projects that could lead us there and be turned into daily inputs. I'm no exception in this regard and want to share some of my personal thoughts with you in this article...
For 2023, my only real goals where to embrace Rust and Svelte as my go-to programming languages/frameworks and open up a bit personally. And oh boy, did I ever succeed at these. I usually don't like to brag, but it's really justified here and I feel that it's adequate to be proud of myself for a moment. So let's take a look at how the planned and unplanned developments individually went:
- Svelte: An absolute success, I use it for everything related to complex web applications now - also in combination with TypeScript, which wasn't initially planned, but turned out to be a huge life saver.
- Rust: Somewhat successful - worked my way through the offical Rust tutorial book, which is amazing by the way, but never really used it due to a lack of project ideas and supporting libraries at the time.
- Kotlin: An unexpected win - first introduced to me during my work placement at CEWE , it turned out to be an amazing Rust alternative that not only is null-safe and has immutable variables as well as type inference, but also leverages the already existing Java ecosystem of libraries and frameworks, which makes it really versatile and fun to work with.
- Embracing proper type-usage and expressive custom data structeres: Also not a planned success, but came to be via the incredibly easy-to-use data classes in Kotlin, which made me realize how ugly as well as bad to understand and maintain most of my prior code was. This also led to the huge wave of "ng" (next generation) rewrites I made during the summer.
- Focussing on productivity: With school and personal obligations becoming increasingly demanding, I just started looking into the whole productivity bubble and it became an unplanned hobby of mine - probably even the second favorite. I started to use time blocking in my calendar, track habits within my diary and recently also implemented the Fokus Framework and Getting Things Done methodology to turn long-term projects into daily inputs.
- Opening up to new activities and meeting interesting people: Even though I never quite felt socially isolated or alone and that also factually wasn't the case, I desperately needed a change of my surrounding and therefore forced myself to try out new activities and meet other people with great success. Humans are truely good on an individual level and I have not had a single bad expierence so far - a big recommendation for everyone looking into a personal change.
- Exercising in the gym and becoming fitter: Also nothing on my radar a year ago, I not necessarily got a bit tired of running and biking (which I did more than ever before by the way), but wanted to expand my athletic horizon in the second half of the year and started going to the gym. It has also been a wonderful experience and at least for me was not nearly as hard to integrate into my schedule as some people make it seem.
So what's planned for 2024? Some quite big changes in almost every area of my life - some due to leaving school, but most through personal strivings. I'm a bit afraid that I might not manage to deal with all of them, but that's something only time will tell and as everyone knows life only begins at the edge of the comfort zone. So here are the key objectives I'm feeling fine about to share with the world (which is basically all of them):
- Getting through the last few months of school and finally receiving for my Abitur.
- Moving to an entirely unfamiliar city for the dual study program from a big German automotive company I'm participating in.
- Expanding my media output with a completely new biweekly format.
- Developing a project of mine into a real product and potentially selling it as a side hustle.
- Continuing my personal development journey both physically and mentally with a new exercise plan, some more foreign activities and lots of books to read.
With that said, I hope you had an amazing year as well, get smoothly into the new one and can become the best version of yourself - whatever that might mean for you. Maybe I inspired you to tackle some new challenges, hopefully haven't made you feel guilty about not being as productive and potentially just wasted a few minutes of your time ;) Anyway, have a good one and you'll hear from me again next week...