2023 - A generally positive assessment

It's that time of the year again! And for the first time in my life, I will make a little review of this year.

Projects

Godot

• Le Croque-Mitaine (The boogeyman in English). I'm pretty exited about this one. With my wife, we want to create an horrific 2d point and click, a mix between Monkey Island and Sanitarium. She is a gifted video-game artist, I am a meh developer and it is my first real-serious video game, so I have a lot to learn here. And I am pretty sure that my code will be working but not in the idiomatic Godot Way, if such a thing exists. Let's hope we will keep working on it in 2024, and that it will be the first of many projects!

• Small games with my son. He acts like a Gatling of video games concept and ideas so it's hard to keep on with him. We worked on two small games this year, and I'm pretty sure we will continue to works on new one next year. I just hope he won't ask me to make a clone of Pokemon.

Rust

Rust is still my language crush for 2023 and will be for 2024. But to be honest, I didn't really look for something new in this area, but it looks like Rust is here to stay (in the daaaark 𝅘𝅥𝅮) so let's stick to it

• HaRSS! Still working on it. I still hope to finish it somehow, someday. I am not so far from a fist working and usable version of the API, but the worse is yet to come: the user interface. I think I will try leptos to build it, but I'm not 100% sure yet.

• Advent of code 2023. Like each year since 2020, I try to do it in Rust. This year was no exception, and I frustrated me pretty quickly. Difficulty was oscillating and some of the exercises were not really clear. I had less difficulty with rust, more with the actual exercises. Maybe I will continue a bit on my spare time, but I don't really have some spare time, so... Let's try again next year!

Tools

• Along-side with my rust journey, I wanted to try a new code editor. I am used to Jetbrains' tools as I used IntelliJ for work so I used to use the Rust plugin for it. But this year, Jetbrains decided to make it a full paid IDE, and I don't really like the subscription model. Also there latest integration with AI assisted tool doesn't really suit me. Of course, Visual Studio Code was out of the question. So Helix here I am! I am still not 100% efficient, not even 10% efficient, but I am improving day by day. This blog post even is written with Helix. The native support of LSP is great, the documentation is clear, and you don't need to use a tons of plugins to make it just works, like with vim or neovim. I tried neovim and it just... too much setup for me.

• After year of hesitation, I also buy a Qwerty mechanical keyboard. I love it. But I still have some old azerty reflex that slow me down a bit. Not that I was typing at 40 wpm in the first place, far from that, but it's even worse now. Still I don't regret the change, and thanks to the qwerty-fr layout, I still can use my french accent easily.

Work

It was a bit rocky this year at work.

• A lot of departure, sadly. I hope my ex-colleagues are happy were they are now, but some of them miss me or will miss me. I hope The Management will do something to avoid it to continue next year.
• But on the bright side, new faces! From non-french speaking countries. So that brings me to next item
• English lessons! In order to understand and speak a better English with my colleagues, I asked my company if they could pay me some English course to improve myself and they agree! So that's cool! I will probably ask for a Spring Data course next year, because the more I use it (particularly Hibernate), the more I think I understand it, and the more I realize that no, absolutely not.
• Remote. My managers agreed to let me move in the Vosges (Mountains in the east of France), I would only have to come two days per month in the office. So that's great! The only issue here is that interest rate for a loan sky rocketed this year, so... Yeah, we won't move this year. But we are perfectly happy were we are right now so that's not an issue.
• Snowflake. It looks like the new trending technologies. It also looks like a database, but in the cloud! And that's amazing: you can share data to others snowflake accounts without copying them*! To quote a future ex-colleague, "Snowflake is the new Oracle". No, it's not a good thing. So this year I will probably still works with it, sadly.

*As long as your snowflake instance use the same cloud provider and the same region as you. So thanks for nothing.

Health (not the music band)

• Still alive, yay! Well, there is no real reason why I shouldn't be alive. No smoke, no drugs, few alcohol (something like one or two drinks per week max). I'm still overweight, I think that's the con of working mostly at home. This year I tried to do something about it, without a real success. Let's try this again (for like 10 years in a row).
• In an effort to lose weight, I subscribed to my local gym. I try to go there twice a week, and so far I have been successful. Mostly doing cardio, a bit of abdominal exercises to help me with my back (I used to have a lot of pain in my back). For now it doesn't really help me to lose weight, but heh, it doesn't (oh yes it does, a lot).
• I am always tired. Even after a good night of sleep, it's still really hard to wake up in the morning, and I really need a coffee (did I say no drugs?) and a shower to start the day. Maybe I need to change my food, even thought I think it's balanced? I don't know, I will maybe try to discuss this with my physician.
• I saw a lot of think about ADHD and stuff like this this year. I don't know if it's the new trending disorder, like gluten-related disorders were a few years back (note: I am not minimizing it, I just think that marketing took the hype train), but it seems to be everywhere this year. And I am not saying that maybe I have this, but I sometime recognize myself in some symptoms. Another topic to discuss, maybe, with my physician this year.

Blogging and social media and messaging

• In the late 2022, I created a profile on fosstodon.org. I never was a "social media" person: I had a facebook account that I closed near 2010, I had a twitter account that I needed to use their API back in the time. Oh, and I still have a LinkedIn account, which is probably the shittiest, funniest and weirdest social media that exists; everybody there seems to be either completely insane or depressed or both. Anyway, Mastodon: It's... not bad? I'm not posting a lot of thing on it, mainly because nobody cares about what I thing or do, but some great people are on it, and the ability to follow tags instead of people is really great. And of course, the whole fediverse idea is great, I think it's the true spirit of what was meant to be the web before corporations took over. So yeah, I think I will stick to it in 2024, maybe even toss a coin to my witcher fosstodon.org if I can.
• I use Discord a lot more, as it seems to be the new place to be for open-source projects? At least the ones I follow. It's a bit sad, I would prefer to use a open source solution like Matrix or even the good ol' IRC but I must admit that it works really well. I just hope it won't enshitify like... everything else.
• Microsoft Teams. I have to use it for my English lessons, and this... thing must be burn, buried in the depth of a magma chamber, erased from the history of Humankind, and never mentioned again. It's slow, it eats way to much RAM for what it does (is it because of Electron?), it's one of the worst UX I have ever had (and trust me, I saw a lot of them: I use Jira and a lot of open-source software). Oh, and of course it doesn't run on Firefox anymore because Microsoft is too lazy to support two browser engines (it's a small enterprise, that's understandable).
• Previously I used Ghost as a blogging platform. It ran in a docker container on my scaleway stardust instance and it was OK for a time, until it suddenly decided to eat all the CPU. And ghost is build with node.js and require a MySQL/maria database, instead of using snowflake postgres like any reasonable project. So, in my quest for minimalism and resources efficient solutions (says the guy who does Java Spring Boot APIs on kubernetes for a living), I decided to switch to Zola. I write my post in markdown, and Zola makes a static website with it. No javascript, no tracking, no database, RSS support, no comments, a few kilobytes per pages and that's it. I voluntary chose this theme which is really minimalist but it does everything I need. I created a little GitHub workflow to build and publish the website each time I commit and push something on main, so that's cool! I hope next year I will write more posts, but I still have no idea what to write on it.
• Since GitHub looks more and more like an enshitified AI filled social media and less and less like a collaborative source repository, I decided to slowly move to Codeberg. Why Codeberg and not Gitlab? It's non-profit, hosted in Europe and without tracking. I even seriously think about join the association. In 2024 I will try to move all my existing project on it, and I will probably have to fight to make my C.I. workflows running on it.

Movies and books and TV shows and video games

• During the last 3 years, we subscribe to the Big Three: Amazon Prime (mainly for the free delivery service, and yes, we need to stop buying stuff on Amazon, the little Jeff is rich enough like this), Netflix and Disney+. It cost a lot of money and we will probably cut one of them this year. It will probably be Prime. Still I am wondering if it won't be better to return to the old Bluray or to... alternative solutions 🏴‍☠️.
• I've been to the movie theater a few times this year:
  • Dungeons and dragons: A really good surprise!
  • Barbie: Makes me laugh a lot with one outrageous punchline
  • Mario: Really loved this one, especially Lumalee, even if we were worried that our son asked to much questions 😬
  • Paw Patrol: Well... yeah... What we won't do for our children...
  • The Marvels: Not good, not bad. I don't understand the hate around this movie.
• I also watched some stuff in streaming:
  • Bridgeton on Netflix. My wife makes me watch it and... even if I'm not a fan of romance or victorian stuff, but finally... I really liked it. Even if there is waaay to many characters (more than 2 it too much for me), I was able to follow. It becomes our weekly show of the Friday, just the two of us.
  • Gen V on prime: Gory, Fun, same as the boys but in a high school. I will probably forget it next year until the season 4 of The Boys is released.
  • The Fall of the house of Usher on Netflix: I really liked this one. Never read the original short story from Poe, I probably should.
  • In the mouth of madness on... alternate means: An old horror movie from John Carpenter. It aged pretty well I would say. Not my favorite from the Apocalypse Trilogy (That would be The Thing) but still a solid movie.
  • And probably a lot more that I forget
• I read waaaay less than I want to (expect bed time stories, this, management (a.k.a. my son) won't let me skip it). I am still reading Hyperion Cantos and I bought a Belgian SF novel Printeurs (yes, not Printers) from Ploum. Now I must read it. Let's hope next year I will able to read more! And in English maybe.
• About the music, I will let Spotify talks for me. I really want to find another way to discover and remunerate artists, but for now, I kinda like Spotify.
• Video games! Steam says this. I really liked It Takes Two with my son, and really, relay loved MyHouse.wad. And recently, I began Baldur's Gate 3, and yes, it's fun, especially with Dark Urge.

The external world

• (New) Wars. Capitalism. Climate change. Extremism rising everywhere. We are fucked.