Hello future me, if you're reading this. I'm posting to answer the following questions:
How was 2023? What did you learn? What could have gone better? What are you looking forward to in 2024?
Twenty three was a big year no matter how you look at it. Starting a new role, becoming a dad and committing to a new schedule of writing in public.
Working from home
Working remote full time is something I started in the pre-covid years of 2017. In 2023, I spent my full time working remote other than 3 meet ups in person with colleagues. Back in 2017 it was a lucky chance that I happened to get an interview at a budding New Zealand based agency that was hiring exclusively remotely. This was something I picked up as an experiment, loving the idea, but also fearing failure and thinking about how it might not work out or might be tough. Instead, of my worst fears, I found a thriving pace where I used the flexibility of remote work to hit this insanely awesome life/work balance. Delivering what needed to be done, but also allowing epic adventures. Surfing, working in other countries, traveling the country in my Van. In 2023, I've returned to remote work, but this time with 100x less epic surf adventures and about 1000x MORE epic dad adventures.
The motivation on 'why remote' works has changed, but the core remains the same. You should choose remote work only if you can find the extrinsic motivation to make it work.
New interesting saas product
With the end of 2022, I started a new role. Still working on a SAAS product, in a small team, but one with many interesting diferrences. I traded backup software for managed service providers to maritime domain awareness tools. The customers couldn't be more different. Technology wise, I kept Go, and added a suit of geospatial tech I had used in prior roles. It has been an exciting ride to say the least!
My new role is focused on ingesting new data sources in to the app and working with machine learning and data science people to develop features and train models on that data. This 'data engineering' focus is a new one for me, and one where I'm enjoying being able to focus on just one aspect of the stack. Making the platform, cheaper, faster and more resillient to operate remains a really rewarding part of the role. This year I have been able to deliver a number of scale-up improvemnts to the platform, added interesting infrastructure as code and introduced new SLO's to track user experience.
There have been new technologies to pick up and learn in 2023. Highlighting just a few, I have picked up Kubernetes, Terraform and google cloud for the first time. These are new flavours of technology I am already familiar with. You get a nice comparison between the platforms and tools when swapping around between them, and I'm hoping this improves that tacit knowledge of when and what tool to use for the job.
A trend I am noticing is that the technology at work is becoming more and more complex, and more optimized for multiple software teams. I get to play with technology at work that makes zero sense to use on my own side projects. The problems being solved are differrent, and the constraints are different. It's interesting to think about what does scale between the side project and the team aspect, and that's an area where we (developers) should all be putting a bit more focus on.
Shipping content instead of code
A big change at the end of 2023 was to start shifting my writing to public forums. Like most developers, I started this the wrong way, by writing a static site generator. My goal here has a few facets, but the most important part is to improve my writing, and start playing in the content marketing and SEO space. Beyond the learning goals, I just want to put something useful back in to the internet. I have been a blog enjoyer for most of my life, and it's time to put useful content back in to the internet.
I built a few apps using the Wails framework. Not only as a fun and new way to build light weight desktop applications, but also as a good avenue for creating content. It might seem tiny, but getting a retweet from the creators was a huge personal win for me! I'm hoping to continue making content on Wails in 2024.
Making a solid push at the end of 2023 on posting blog content was one of my greatest personal achievements. Look out for more in 2024. I will aim to publish 20 blog posts between now and the end of 2024.
It's hard to list things here, not just because it's the internet and I don't want to encourage even more ridicule. You see, I am reasonably optimistic, and 2023 has been a pretty great year. But let's push a bit and see what we can do to give this exercise a real chance.
My CRDT work is a bit lost. I'm stuck on a tricky bug with the frontend, that impacts the synchronization algorithm. This will be fixed eventually if I just do the work, but I'm now keeping myself to a higher standard on publishing my journey with the blog, and sometimes the journey doesn't feel meaningful when you come to the end of your short available window of time to work on it, then it feels silly to write about such small gains.
I picked up and flipped a number of tiny things that never saw the light of day. Learning Zig, Evaluating 'Rustic'. Picking up and writing about rust.
There is always that background itch that I could ship things faster, better stronger. Something that's been with me from when I first started coding at university 13 years ago.
I wish I started this whole process earlier of writing and sharing earlier. Imagine how much better I would be today?
The main thing I'm learning from all this is that when I'm writing about a tech side project, I should really complete the project before starting to write about it. This is going to lead to less pressure to deliver content + technical progress. As a result, my blog might be a bit more focused on topics that fit this model better, more story time and question/answer time, and less 'here is a new thing I'm working on'.
My year ahead is going to be focused on three pillars; professional work, personal work, family.
I'm excited for working on Starboard (maritime domain awarenes). We have a lot on the road map. Technically, there are some tricky problems to solve involving large datasets and high volumes of events. Business wise, I'm very excited to be more involved in sales conversations and partnerships with vendors. It is still at that sweet spot of stretching my technical skills, and giving me a lot of access to work alongside fantastic engineering/marketing/sales/product people.
Publishing my work to the internet is going to be a focus of '24 for my personal work. Getting better at writing, publishing code, telling the world about it in more places. The specific technical areas I'm keen on doubling down in are 'local first' stack. My writing will likely to continue being a mix of practice related chat, and deep technical posts about what I'm working on.
Growing as a dad. The mother of my daughter will be returning to work, and I'm hoping to get the balance just right, where I can put dedicated dad time in, and get to be a part of my daughters foundational first year. If I'm winning, I think I will look back and be happy with the amount of time I'm not working and just dadding. Being a good husband, and father are core to who I am now, and I'm going to be focusing on this pilar of life deeply. How I'm going to do it is to engage fully with this double working parent of a 1 year old life, making sure the pipeline is always full with a next great family adventure involving surfing or camping or hiking.
If I am killing it in '24, then I will look back and say I focused on these areas authentically and earnestly. Not comprimising too much on one or the other.
Twenty twenty three was a big year, I'm excited for what's coming. Expecting heaps of growth and challenge as a family, in work and side-hacks on the weekend. If you've made it this far, thanks! If you are ersin reading this from the future, hope the year went well and that this post has been useful in reflecting and planning on the next year after!