The year is almost over and I’m starting to think about 2023 but I wanted to collect some of my thoughts on what’s been on my mind lately.

Web & tech

The time I’ve spent putting together a working stack for my web development has led to a pretty good development experience (DX). I started the year with various plans to work on different projects but mid-year after some very life altering family changes, I had to reassess my time and how I was spending time. Instead of jumping from project to project, I decided to just stop working on many different things and focus on just delivering small features for one project, which led me to build BoardSearch. This has been the most pleasant DX I’ve worked in and I think writing up a whole tech stack post is worth it at some point in the next few weeks.

Next year, I think putting together a templatized tech stack for building web apps might have some good pay off from it. I am realizing time spent planning projects and technology decisions helps a long way. So instead of jumping head first into a project, just sketching some things on paper, realizing how my technology choices will impact the project and moving one simple step at a time really helps my motivation stay consistent.

At a societal level, technology has become this time and money hungry beast that some people tend to partake in at some level. Things like TikTok and Instagram are attention hungry apps that will easily help you waste away hours of your day and then there are other more curation worthy platforms like Reddit that can go down any path you really choose. This blog and my projects at a basic level exist because I hope that whoever spends time reading this or using my projects can see that useful and helpful things can exist without an algorithm persuading you to consume it.

Time

The amount of time I’ve spent on gaming and TV has dramatically increased this year, most weeknights I’m either gaming or watching TV. In some cases, it’s great but there are weeks where it feels like I am doing it as a way to waste away time instead of spending time enjoying it. This is something I’m thinking of trying to balance better in the coming months.

I have been slowly making progress on reading some of the books that have been on my list. Currently, in the first half of LOTR: Fellowship of the Ring and it’s going great. It’s been a book on my list for a long time and now I’m finally getting around to enjoying it. Many other books are either started or in middle somewhere but not worth mentioning because I’m not fully committed to reading them at the moment. At any given point, I’m reading at least 3 and upwards of 8 books so it’s just a matter of what mood I’m in. There are a lot of books with bookmarks in them on my shelves.

Home

At the house, currently there a lot of things unorganized or messy. Some obvious ones are my office has a ton of things in it that are just messy or unorganized or should not be in here at all. It started temporarily to store some things while the storage area in the garage was cleared out but now almost 12 months into the move, it feels like there’s no fix yet. I’m going to be focusing on this very soon as well.

The winter in Portland is cold but I don’t mind it knowing what the summers here are like, it’s all worth it. Overall, almost a year into the move, I’m very happy with the decision to leave the Bay Area.