The 2023 Year in Review

Dec 30, 2023

general

As the new year is about to ring in, the best place to start this blog is with a review of 2023. First, a look at my 2023 list of goals and where I landed with them:

  1. Learn Swift and iOS development. ✅
  2. Take my partner and dad to Italy to see where we came from. ✅
  3. Start grad school. ✅
  4. Settle into my role as an engineering manager for a software development team. ✅
  5. Start living a healthier lifestyle and being more physical. ✅
  6. Regroup with my old D&D friends and start a new game. ❌
  7. Read more than I did last year. ✅
  8. Start getting my AWS certifications. ✅
  9. Restart my personal website and blog. ✅

Comments about my 2023 goals

1. Learn Swift and iOS development.

I tried multiple times over the last 4 years to try and do this on my own. Every time, I would drift away and find other things to distract me. While working on my BSCS, I learned that when I have an “accountability buddy,” I stay focused and more driven. To assist me, I enrolled in my first bootcamp, Kodeco’s iOS Accelerator Bootcamp.

I enjoyed the experience and recommend the course to anyone interested in iOS development. Having a CS background made things a lot easier. However, some concepts in Swift took me a bit to wrap my head around (mostly boilerplate procedure stuff). I used an app I had wanted to make for a long time as my capstone and plan on polishing it more and getting it to the App Store in 2024. It was great seeing all the student’s work, even if their design skills were way more impressive than mine (I am definitely a developer and not a designer 🤣).

2. Take my partner and dad to Italy to see where we came from.

This was hands down one the most amazing things I have done in my life. Seeing all the places and structures I have been reading about since childhood was great. Driving into Matese and visiting the village where my ancestors were from was very sobering. Amalfi was one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen with my own eyes.

We have already started discussing further trips to Italy. This trip focused on the central region and the area around Naples. We really want to visit the country’s northern and southern parts.

I’m sure I’ll be writing more about this.

3. Start grad school.

This actually happened! Although, it has yet to turn out how I thought it would. I started in a program that is very recognized. Unfortunately, the schedule was just too incompatible with the demands of my job. When I started to reconsider things, the University of Colorado Boulder began an MSCS program much more accommodating to working students. I’m working through the Software Architecture for Big Data breadth class, which will solidify my admission to the program upon completion.

4. Settle into my role as an engineering manager for a software development team.

Becoming an engineering manager has been a rough transition. I love leading my team. I love mentoring. What has been challenging is the constant meetings, the mindless “paperwork” and busy work, and… frankly.. seeing “how the sausage is made.” I miss being an individual contributor. We’ll see where this new year takes me.

5. Start living a healthier lifestyle and being more physical.

Been jogging regularly since November 2022. I often find myself choosing the stairs or walking instead of driving. I’ve been doing my best to get to the gym whenever possible. This year, I want to add more weight training to my schedule.

6. Regroup with my old D&D friends and start a new game.

Sadly, this never happened. I hope it happens in 2024. I have been working on a few new adventures and would like to get them on the table. It won’t be with the group that got me through COVID, but change is the one constant in the universe.

7. Read more than I did last year.

Definitely read a great deal more than I did in 2022. Besides all the journal papers I have been reading for school, I’ve also been reading paper copies of tech books rather than hitting eBook versions. I like making notes in the margins, highlighting, etc. I also read a few books for personal enjoyment; my favorite this year is 1776 by David McCullough. In 2024, I plan on finishing The Expanse novels.

8. Start getting my AWS certifications.

I got my AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification this year and just in time. Soon, my team will be moving to manage our cloud instance on the project I work on, which will help me navigate the technical requirements a bit more. It helped me finally get into containers on my personal server, which I enjoy working with.

9. Restart my personal website and blog.

I took a few different stabs at this over the last year. Initially, I was looking at Nextjs, but there was a lot of churn in the codebase. Once their transition from their old way of doing things solidifies, it will be a great framework to work within. Other considerations included Gatsby with a WordPress back-end, posting text files, etc.

I settled on Astro. It lets me work in a familiar language (JavaScript), it is easy to set up, it works with my preferred way of writing (Markdown), and with a Netlify / Github pipeline, it makes deployments very easy.

Other events of 2023

A few other notable events occurred in 2023. First, we took our first trip to Puerto Rico, which we have fallen in love with. I’ve also started getting very interested in Spring and Spring Boot. I’ve always liked working in Java, and in 2024, I plan on refining my skills in it much more. I’ve been getting very excited about the recent call for a return to the “weird web” (see Robert Knight’s “The Web is Fantastic” and a recent article from Rolling Stone’s Anil Dash, “The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again”). Sure, I sound like a grey beard at this point, but I miss the open weirdness of the old web. The mass commercialization of our attention over the last 10 years has soured something that I have loved since the first time I used it back on the Cleveland Freenet.

I’ll be posting more about my 2024 goals here soon.