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For the second year, following some of the most inspirational blogs that I follow, I will write about my year, and this time it will be public. Some of the coolest blogs that I follow on a day-to-day basis are doing it, so why can’t do it too, right?
I would say that 2023 was one of the greatest years of my life. Like everyone else, I had ups and downs, but the fact that I learned too much in a lot of areas of my life, makes me think that I’m a completely new person from how I started the year. Reading the OKRs that I wrote for this year I consider this idea even more.
It’s a good exercise to reflect on what happened this year and prepare for what is coming next, my idea with this post is to finish this year with a golden key and start the next one with all the excitement that I have writing here.
For this post, I will cover some specific topics that I want to share here, they are:
- Books and reading
- Programming
- Job
- Writing
Health
I would say that 2023 was not my year for health. I do not prioritize it in a lot of ways, but the three great ones that I think are: food, exercise, and sleep. And the impact of this choice came at different times throughout my year.
Food
I love to cook things and do meal prepping, but I do not spend too much of the year around it. The trade-off was that what I was eating, in general, doesn’t have some nutritive benefits, and as we know, what you eat in general is a fundamental part of the rest of your health. The quality of food in general wasn’t too good.
Exercise
It has its ups and downs during the year. I tried a lot of times to go to the gym and turn it into a consistent habit because I love to do exercise. I love to run and take walks, it helps me a lot to clean my brain and help me with my thoughts, and it’s connected with other aspects like controlling my anxiety and helps in the quality of my sleep. But I don’t take the right priority on it and I lose my streak several times during the year.
Sleep
I’m an easier sleep, I don’t have any issue trying to sleep and I can easily do it in any place that I want to do. But, the quality of my sleep is awful. Doing some tracking around it, I take just 6 hours of sleeping with an average of 1 hour of REM sleep. I made some improvements in the consistency: like not going to sleep every night around 4 AM and waking up almost all days at 6 or 7 AM.
Books
This was a great year around my reading habit. I proposed to myself to take 12 books and successfully read them until the last day of December. From those 12 books, I read 10. Which, for me, it’s a great achievement, considering that I completely lost one of the habits that I most like: the habit of reading. If you want to check which are these books, you can check it on my list of books that I read. For the next year, I already have a lot of books that I want to read, most of them technical books.
One of the core things that I learned from this habit and that I will bring to my 2024 is: that I don’t want to read more books, I just want to read those that make me learn something. This is one of the core philosophies that I will follow for 2024, ensuring that it’s better to spend time with books that impact my life, like the ones related to self-improvement that bring some cool ideas or those technical ones that are related to a subject of my interest.
Career and Work
A great year related to my career! I had the first opportunity to give a talk, and I learned a lot of cool things in a lot of different subjects, like Math, Distributed Systems, Web stuff, Compilers, and other cool stuff that I have a lot of interest in. I want to write about all these things someday. I started a lot of different projects too, like these:
- nero, my tree-walk interpreted programming language written in Rust.
- I rewrote my blog in Astro.
- Paxos From Scratch, my attempt to learn more about consensus algorithms, also written in Rust;
One thing that I want to bring to 2024 is the ambition to finish the projects that I started one day. I think that considering all these aspects, it was a great year for my career and I expect that 2024 may be the same.
For my work, I continue working at Woovi, for a total of 1 year and 9 months, and I can say that it is one of the best decisions I made for myself. I need to thank every one of my coworkers for this year, I was able to learn a lot not only about the work, but I was able to have some introspective processes thanks to conversations I had with each of them, and what best I could bring to myself. But I’m far from achieving the performance that I believe is ideal for my professional side, and that’s exactly what I’m going to look for in 2024.
Writing
I started to write more about my ideas and insights related to things that I like in tech in 2022, but I would say that was 2023 the year where I consolidated it as one of my passions and one of habits that I love to have. Exposing my ideas and my beliefs in words helps me a lot to understand myself and organize my thoughts in a way that seems coherent.
In 2023 I wrote a lot, I have cool blog posts that I wrote both here in this blog or dev.to, like these:
- Design System 101: Top-down Approach in Component Spacing
- Server-side Rendering (SSR) From Scratch with React
- Avoiding UI Regressions With Jest
Other blog posts have been written here. You can find them on the respective list. 2023 was a good year for improving my writing skills and knowing how to write for the final user in a good way.
Next steps in 2024?
Well, this was a little about my year in review. I believe that 2024 will be so great than 2023 will be for me, and I hope that can be great for you too.
For 2024, the core aspect of what I want to focus on is health. Believing more and more that having a healthier body and a healthier mind is a core, fundamental piece to have a peak performance in any other aspect of my life. Focusing a lot on what I already talked about before: food, exercise, and sleep.
Meal prepping and cooking are some of the best hobbies that I have in my life, and improving them during 2024 will be great stuff. Even because cooking is a good way to take some rest of the “outside world” and recharge your batteries.
Exercise and sleep will be carefully taken as priorities too. Ensuring that I’ll turn it into one of the habits for my new year.
I want to write more too. I have a lot of ideas for blog posts and series that I would like to write and I will move forward to get out of the paper and put it into screens, In 2024 I will write much more.
In terms of other aspects of my life, I want to take more travels with my girlfriend, one feeling that I think I’ve lost in the last years was the anxiety of discovering new things, new people, new languages, and/or new cultures. I believe that it is an enriching way to grow in life and learn more about yourself and others, and it’s the kind of experience that you take for the rest of your life, it’s what makes you alive. I already have some things planned on it and others I will discover yet.
The word for my 2024 will be consistency. In every aspect of my life.
I would like to say a big thank you to all the people who played an important role in my 2023. I hope your year was as special as mine. And a special thank you to these people: to my girlfriend who supports me despite my annoyance, I love you too much, to my friends who made my 2023 much better, and a special thank you to Sibelius and Ivan who were essential mentors and friends for my professional and personal growth in this year, thanks for all the advices.
Happy New Year, reader! I hope that 2024 will be so great for you too!