Well, this has certainly been a year. A lot of things changed, me included. I’ve gained some experience and skills over this year, not in the least thanks to this blog. Having to report my progress regularly, even on a blog that nobody reads, is a pretty nice motivator, I guess. Not the most effective one, of course, but you know, baby steps. Maybe next year I’ll have more people doing something similar and then we can motivate (or rather, discipline) each other.
The final results are not particularly impressive, but they certainly beat whatever I’ve done in previous years. I’m sure next year is going to be even better.
You could say I’ve only read a couple of books. You’d be correct. The only ones I can name off the top of my head are the Kerberos book and the perfbook. I’m still reading the latter one, by the way. The former one did not serve its purpose in the end, as I dropped a project I was thinking of doing. But I don’t regret spending time on the book: it was pretty interesting and I may use this information for another project later, we’ll see.
This year I’ve started my fork of guilt, implemented a little patch splitting utility,a little project I’ve not shown here yet, learned a little bit of Vulkan, and got some Zig practice doing about a week of Advent of Code. Frankly speaking, I’m disappointed with myself and these results. To try and fix the situation, I will impose a stronger rule on myself: if a weekly report doesn’t have a “good” programming section, the stylish rating for that week is nulled. I still need to decide what “good” means, though.
I’ve had a 183 (I think) days streak between these three languages on Duolingo. I used German mostly to do some quick lessons when I wanted to avoid getting double XP rewards on the other two courses. While there has been quite some progress, I’m starting to feel I should put more effort into learning these languages if I want to actually accomplish anything. So long story short, I stopped using Duolingo and now I’m trying to figure out how to proceed. The plan so far is to properly learn some grammar and find some content I could watch and read.
I’ve actually learned to drive a car this year. Well, almost. I can’t prove it to you because I’ve not had a chance to take the exam yet, as I’m still waiting in the queue. Turns out it takes a loooong time. I learned both manual and automatic transmission, but I definitely need more practice with manual. The idea was to quickly take an exam on automatic, drive a rented car for some time, then take an exam on manual. Not sure if that’s viable anymore, but we’ll see.
Honestly, the progress has been slow. It’s hard to unglue myself from my computer and do something in the real world. Especially since it requires me to fiddle with small boxes: I need to take the components out, assemble something, make sure I’ve not broken or lost anything, and then carefully put everything back. I’ve got a better “workplace” right now so hopefully switching between computer things and electronics is going to become easier.