2023 Year in review

(This read and honestly, any other one would be nicer if you had Found by Jacob Banks or Face by Alex Kehm playing in the background)

In his 2022 year in review, Alex Kondov wrote that his grandmother told him that how you spend the first day of a new year will reflect the rest of the year. So on January 1, I woke up early put on my running shoes, my headphone and went for a jog. It was cold and the streets were empty but it was fun. After the jog, I went to church, bought books, read a bit, hung out with my girlfriend, and spent the rest of the day writing code.

That’s ultimately what I did over the year so if you want only a short version you can stop here but if you want the long one I have a few more words for you.

Programming

In my 2022 review, I had wrote:

I want to refresh my fundamentals, deep dive into the technologies I learned this year, complete a side project and expand my horizons with distributed systems (Microservices), infrastructure (Kubernetes, CI/CD, Docker), system design, and cloud technologies.

I thought the best way to learn all these things was to build, so I built:

Seiri: an app to manage your tasks and notes in the same place for free, the app is built with Nestjs, React, Docker, and Mysql. I have been using it daily for the last 9 months.

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Fawkes: a complete project management app, you can handle teams, tasks, roadmap, wiki, and many more. The app is built following microservices architecture, different languages for the backend, React for the frontend, observability (logs, traces, and monitoring), and some DevOps best practices (Docker, CI/CD).

mariusniemet.me: a brand new personal website built with Gatsby.

Leetcode: I have also solved leetcode questions for interview preparation but I gave up at some point it’s still something I don’t enjoy doing, I have taken more pleasure in learning system design than data structures and algorithms, I know, I know I have to practice more because this work won’t come on its own.

By building all these projects, I learned a lot of tools, technologies, and algorithms I didn’t know. Unfortunately, the projects are still running on my local machine 😅 I have to buy the domains and the hosting then share them with everyone.

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Thanks to the masters Meissa, Alex, and Lakhassane for having answers to all my stupid questions.

Writing

This year I was more focused on building rather than writing, I wrote:

DSA12# How to implement a graph (Adjacency List and Matrix) in Javascript
How to use Job Queue to handle email sending in your NestJS Server
Writing Unit Tests for your NestsJS Rest API
Building your First Rest API with NestJS and TypeORM and test it with Postman

But these four articles have been read more than everything I wrote so far on my blog, I don’t know how it’s even possible maybe it’s about NestJS since it’s getting more hype I just can’t explain it.

Overall the articles have been viewed 4245 times and read 2511 times it’s almost four times the stats of 2022. I have gained 17 followers over the year. That is only on Medium which is my main platform, I didn’t track stats on LinkedIn and dev.to.

Reading

I have read:

Books

Harry Potter (currently in the 6th book)
Distributed systems with Nodejs
Introduction to observability
Hunger Games (the first book)

Manga

Blitz
Berserk
Demon Slayer

For someone you have read 0 book the year before, I made some progress. I didn’t know that I would enjoy reading as much as I did this year, it’s one of the activities I enjoyed the most.

Training

I love jogging it’s one of the best ways to train your body. Here are my stats:

// image I wanted to do better than in 2022 and I did. I doubled the number of activities and almost tripled the distance covered.

Looking for hobbies

I tried new hobbies, I bought a chess board and even a book but I didn’t enjoy that, it felt more like work than a way to have fun.

I bought a guitar but only played it twice over the year.

Content I have enjoyed

Watching

Bill Russell documentary
The Menu (Movie)
Girl Gone (Movie)
Good Doctor season 5 episode 16 (TV Show)
Jackie's retrospective videos (YouTube videos)
Spider-man across the spider-verse (Movie)
An Exceptional Mind (Movie)
Billions (TV Show)
Chernobyl (TV Show)
Silo (TV Show)
Salvation (TV Show)
Lex Fridman (Mark Zuckerberg, Dan Reynolds, Chris Lattner) Podcast

Listening

Cat burns
Kaky
Imagine Dragons
Tom Odell
Alex Kehm Face
Zevia Life I’m over you
Jacob Banks Slow up
Mega Chariot

I have listened to a lot of music 23,079 minutes this year, if you are a Spotify user you can check my profile I have a few public playlists.

Personal note

This year I think has been a great one in multiple areas:

I didn’t deal too much with anxiety this year compared to the previous one and that’s thanks to two things. The first and most important is my FAITH, I used to be highly stressed by the unknown, and I was the kind to be convinced that the worst scenario was going to happen. This year I have learned to trust God and rely on the plan he has for me, I have this sentence I love “Praying is doing your best for the things you can control and asking God for what you can’t” so every time I’m starting to feel the stress I tell myself just do your best and God will handle the rest cause he has a better plan for you. The second thing is journalling, I started journalling around July, and it has surprisingly helped me with my mental health. I have this funny way to rank my day with emoji. I start every entry with the date and the emoji, and then I write down my thoughts and how I feel sometimes I also add images. It’s surprising how writing down these things can help you feel better.

For the first time during the last three years I didn’t lose someone I love so thank you God for taking care of me and the people I love.

As I have mentioned above, I used to be stressed by the unknown so at the beginning of the year, I learned to plan, I wrote all my goals for the year and then split them by quarter so I could know which goal I needed to be focus and over which period.

Planning and journaling have helped me to reduce the feeling of having lost a year cause I know exactly what I did, how I was feeling, and where I was over the entire year.

I spent amazing moments this year, most of them with my girlfriend or my friends and also alone. I remember my friend's birthday party, the night we were supposed to work with two friends but we ended up doing everything except work, we shared stories, ate, and laughed for the entire night, or the day we spent the entire night with my girlfriend talking about how we view the world and what are the important things for us.

Everything I have experimented with this year has helped me to learn a lot about myself, I feel like I know myself better and that’s cool.

I spent most of the time this year working, the intensity I put into my work is a form of insurance against fate, chance, or all the forces of the universe that may not be on my side.

and 2024 ?

Some people say that life is a marathon, not a sprint. I don’t agree with that for me life is a succession of sprints and for each one you have to prioritize something different, I think I'm in the sprint for which I have to prioritize my career I don’t know the next priority but for now, I just have to put the hard work it’s my Maximum Effort Era. I have some technical books to read, things to build (really interesting in distributed systems), and memories to create. I also want to travel to visit my family it’s been almost 5 years without seeing my siblings.

Conclusion

I wish you to be the best version of yourself, it’s the only wish I have for everyone for this new year.

Cheers to 2024 🥂