2023 In Retrospective

Last Year’s Predictions

Last year, I hoped 2023 would be a less exciting year, compared to how 2022 was. And I got that right. Nothing major happened to me in 2023 and I feel like I needed that. It was a year to put my head in its right place and prepare for the next couple of years.

I also mentioned I was planning on refactoring my website, and releasing at least one of the side projects I had planned. I did refactor a huge chunk of my website, but… at this point, I don’t even remember what side project I had in mind when I said that 😅.

I also said I wanted 2023 to be cozy. Eeeh… kinda?

Personal Life

As for my personal life, nothing really big happened this year. Last year I got married and lived in Italy for 3 months, but this year I just moved from one apartment to another in the same city and that’s it. There were a bunch of smaller, but still amazing moments, though!

Travel

My wife and I took some time to discover more of the region we live in (Serra Gaúcha - Brazil). We found out a cool buddhist temple, a random place on a country road filled with mannequins of horror movie characters (!), some really nice parks and places to eat at nearby cities, and, for our 1-year anniversary, we went to a nice retreat in the mountains, and even watched the sunrise atop a hot air balloon!

We also took a trip to São Paulo in August. São Paulo is the biggest city in Brazil (and the biggest in the American continent), and I’d never been anywhere even comparably as big. I consider the city I live in big (with 500k people), but São Paulo’s 22 million people is just something else.

Being such a big city, it’s also a boiling pot of different cultures from all around the country (and neighboring countries as well). Which makes it really fun! We spent a few days there and came across so many different cultures, often on the same street, side by side, resulting in a sight you can’t really see anywhere else.

On Sundays, one of the city’s main avenues (Avenida Paulista) is closed for cars, which turns it into a public space where everything happens, all at once. Just as we got there, we saw a zumba class happening, while a guy dressed up as Batman was singing karaoke in the middle of the street. Wolverine was calmly watching that happen, while African-based religious groups were grouping up across the street to sing and praise their deities. Walking up the street for a couple minutes, you’d find a samba school rehearsing for the carnival and a bit further a DJ in their booth playing some hardcore dubstep. Everything everywhere all at once. It was great.

São Paulo also has an immense amount of museums, including modern art, african art, a museum of Japanese Immigration, and even one of the story of football (soccer) in Brazil. There’s no shortage of culture to be absorbed there, and most of it was either free or really cheap.

Blog

I’m pretty sure this was the best year for the blog, at least considering the amount of posts published. Not counting this one, I’ve published 12 posts, up from the 3 from last year.

I feel like what made me motivated to post more is the fact that I’m now following personal blogs much more than I was in the past - with the death of Twitter, I’ve moved to Mastodon and this pivot towards a more open web has made me start using RSS seriously. Seeing so many people write on their own blogs and experiment with their own websites made me want to work on mine more. It’s a win-win!

I think my favorite post was “Belonging Somewhere”, which was the first post that’s purely personal, no tech involved. My other highlights were the new Zelda game review and me trying to explain why I think “Killers” by Iron Maiden is a concept album. I enjoyed diversifying the subjects I post about, even if those posts don’t do big numbers (which is honestly fine, that’s not why I write).

Speaking of numbers, I joined the blogging trend of posting about my default apps, and after Matt Birchler reposted it on his Mastodon account, I got a huge traffic spike (compared to the regular traffic I get), from 35-50 to 270 visitors on a single day!

As a reminder, all my website’s analytics are privacy-respecting and public, you can see them here.

Something else I’ve tried is shorter articles that are usually reading recommendations of other great articles I’ve read. I’m grouping them under the “Reading Recs” tag and plan to add some filtering in the future.

On the development side, I’ve done a bunch of changes to the website, though none are too visually impactful:

• Added a new Table of Contents component to the longer articles I have. It is auto-generated, responsive, and I think it’s working great! There’s one right here on this post 😁.
• Significantly refactored how blog posts are stored and loaded. I went full steam on Markdown, with all blog posts having their content and metadata stored in Markdown files, and managed inside VS Code with FrontMatter;
  • This included extending Markdown to be able to use some custom elements inside it! Which means that even if I choose to manage posts differently in the future (like using a CMS), I won’t need to change anything in the posts themselves;
• I started using my own image-transmutation package to optimize the images of the website, making sure their quality is good and their size is the smallest possible;
• Swapped the font I use to MacPaw’s Fixel font, a delightful variable font that’s as easy to use as it is to read;
• Added view transitions so that navigating between pages now animates smoothly (Chromium-only, for now);
• Added pagination to posts and a hamburger menu for mobile;

Work Life

This year, I’ve started working full-time for Useful Group, a lovely agency from Illinois, USA, as a web developer building mainly WordPress websites. This was a very interesting development, as previously I was mainly a “web app guy” instead of working on websites, and me having zero experience handling WordPress or PHP. It still felt as a natural step, as I had started to focus more on “the front of the frontend” in recent years, and working with websites allows me to focus on that.

I learned quickly though, and really enjoy the way they work there, and was able to fit in nicely. I particularly enjoyed seeing how you can adapt older, battle-hardened technologies to newer, more modern concepts (like atomic design), and how well everything fits in. It also made me realize how much of what’s “new” in web frameworks nowadays is mainly us going back from SPAs to older concepts.

That might sound bad, but I think it’s actually good when tech comes full circle and goes back to concepts that have worked well in the past, because it means that it has matured. Static/multi-page websites had their issues years ago, which is why SPAs became a popular thing. Of course, SPAs brought their own set of issues and now we’re transitioning back to multi-page websites, but with more mature tooling and with a lot of the original issues solved.

Speaking of static websites, I was contacted by a company that was interested in using my personal website as a template for their own. My website is open source and can be modified by anyone, but they would like me to do the needed modifications, since I was already used to the codebase.

I ended up making a generic blog template instead, based on what my website looked like in that specific point in time. I strongly recommend using that code instead of this in case you’re interested in forking it!

I internally debated for a while if I wanted to keep my website as a fork of that template, or keep them separate. I opted for the latter after realizing that I didn't want my personal website to be tied up to a template meant to help others. I like being able to experiment here, and didn’t want the onus of having to maintain compatibility and/or having to backport anything there.

Fun

Now the best part: the things I enjoyed watching, playing or listening the most in 2023!

TV and Movies

• Succession is a show that I’ve been recommended for a while, but its synopsis had never struck a chord with me. However, I was bored one day and decided to start watching it. And it’s amazing! The show doesn’t take itself seriously, so it’s as much of a comedy as it is a family drama. It follows the lives of a wealthy family that owns a big media conglomerate, and the patriarch’s health is deteriorating and his children start fighting to be his successors. They’re so out of touch with reality, though, that even mundane situations reach absurd conclusions. Available on HBO/Max.
• Bojack Horseman speaks to me on a really deep level, even more on my 2nd rewatch of the show. It starts deceptively simple, and you think it’s going to be a really funny, albeit kinda generic cartoon. And then it hits you. And hits again. It’s an incredibly emotional show that gives you tears of joy and sadness in equal amounts. It’s a must-watch for anyone that has ever gone through any mental health issues and/or would like to understand them better. Plus, it has one of the best autistic representations on TV! Available on Netflix.
• Severance was a surprise hit for me. It’s a show about a company where its employees have their mind severed in half, with one “personality” that only exists in the workplace, while the regular personality doesn’t remember anything from work and only ever experiences the “good parts” of life. As you can imagine, it goes really wrong really fast. It masterfully keeps you hooked with an ever-increasing amount of mystery, but then the bad part comes: season 1 ends in a cliffhanger, and there’s still no word on when season 2 is coming. So I recommend waiting a bit before watching it. Available on Apple TV+.
• Ted Lasso was one of my favorite shows when I watched seasons 1 and 2 last year, and this year I rewatched it all in preparation for the final season 3. It is the most heartwarming show I’ve ever seen, and even the sadder parts hit you just hard enough to make the heartwarming moments even better. Season 3 was not as high quality as the first two, but it still provided me a lot of joy and the ending was really satisfying. Available on Apple TV+.
• The Last of Us was an absolutely incredible experience - a gut punch every episode, but in a good way. I had played the game before, and while I knew the major plot points before they happened, I was absolutely floored when they happened on the show. Incredible writing, acting, and with just enough tweaks to make it feel like a real TV show and not just a game adaptation. The game's story was already really good, and I feel like it was greatly improved for TV. Doesn't mean the show's story is better than the game's, but it definitely is better for TV.

Games

• Disco Elysium is one of the most unique games I've ever played. It has by far the best dialogue of any game I know, and there are so many branching paths that I think it can be replayed multiple times and still provide an unique experience each time. It is basically an investigation RPG, where you play as a cop with an alcohol-induced amnesia, trying to figure out who you are and who’s responsible for a murder. There’s a lot of dialogue and the majority of it is with other voices in your head (fragments of your psyche). It’s nuts. It takes place in a unique world with a ton of lore, it’s incredibly political and it hits really heavy at some points.

• The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is my game of the year - an incredible step up from what was already one of my favorite games of all time. I wrote an in-depth review of it here!
• Hogwarts Legacy was a pretty good game that unfortunately didn't seem to understand its own appeal. It does an incredible job of bringing Hogwarts to life, making the entire castle explorable and full of secrets. Every part of it carefully designed and decorated, with so much attention to detail to praise even the most hardcore book fans. And then… it keeps sending you outside the castle to do generic action adventure game things. And compared to all the other games that do that, it’s just okay.
• Bloodborne again. I’ve written about it last year, and I’ve played it again (twice!) this year, to get the Platinum trophy and… I just love this game so much. It’s become my favorite game of all time and just writing this I feel like playing it again. Masterpiece.

Music

• Last year I discovered the album Infinite Granite by Deafheaven, and it's also been my most listened to album (by far) in 2023. However, I also started listening to other albums by the band and I love them so much. Sunbather and Ordinary Corrupt Human Love especially are gems.
• Shoegazing has become my favorite genre. Wanting to listen to more stuff that sounded like Infinite Granite, I found out about this genre and started building up a playlist on Apple Music, and it’s become my go-to whenever I need to relax, focus or simply listen to great music. If you have Apple Music, you can listen to it too:

Concerts

This year, my wife and I went to 3 amazing concerts! They were all in Porto Alegre, the capital of our state, which is a 2-hour drive from here. They were:

• Bruce Dickinson + Band + Orchestra playing a concert piece composed by Jon Lord from Deep Purple, back in April. They also played some Deep Purple classics and a couple of Bruce Dickinson’s solo songs. Admittedly, I didn’t know the concert piece nor some of the Deep Purple songs, so I went mostly to see Bruce, my favorite singer. It was in a smaller theatre and it was a fantastic experience. I’ll see him again next year, this time on a full solo concert!
• Roger Water’s “This Is Not A Drill” tour, back in November. Absolutely incredible show, a mix of Pink Floyd classics and his own solo work (which I like), and most of all a very clear political statement. I also saw him back in 2018, which was also incredible, and I have no idea which one I’ve liked best. The production value of his shows are simply unmatched and I cried like a baby multiple times.
• Blind Guardian’s “The God Machine” tour, also in November. A smaller venue, but the audience in Blind Guardian’s concerts makes you feel like there are thousands of people with you there. The band is just fantastic and I felt they played extra hard to match the energy of the audience!

2024 Expectations

Time for the predictions - hopefully I’ll get more right this time!

I expect to take big steps towards owning my own house. I really want to stop paying rent and hopefully get a house instead of an apartment. It’s more work, but it’s more fulfilling and freeing.

I expect to write even more on this blog, and continue to expand on the topics I post about. Dev articles aren’t going anywhere, but I don’t always have something to post about in that regard.

Also, I want to add proper support for categories and filtering, as well as search. As I post more, even I am starting to struggle finding something I wrote in the past to reference. Additionally, some code refactoring is always welcome.

I also want to travel a bit next year too - either to the US to meet my work colleagues or to Italy to see my brother. And of course, do some sightseeing!

Wrapping Up

Starting this post, I didn’t think there was much to write about 2023, but I ended up talking about it quite a bit. That’s great! I guess it’s the main point of these kinds of retrospectives - remembering what was noteworthy about the year and reflecting on it. I hope you enjoyed the read and see you next year!