new year

new year, wrapped

Advent of Code: one advent of code completed. Unlike 2020, I didn’t finish it within the 25 days, but I did finish it within the year (wrapped up the last 8 days in the last 3 days). I feel like I implemented BFS multiple times for this AoC this year.

Nandtotetris. I finished everything except the compiler and OS at the end (basically just the last 2 chapters). Mostly think I wrote myself into a corner with the compiler and don’t want to dig myself out. I’ll come back and revisit compiler writing when I want to do compilers; I went into Nandtotetris specifically for the HDL lite. Recommend the coursera setup for it; it’s an incredibly well designed course and clear that everything was thought through thoroughly.

Golang. Some dithering about with small apps this year and then finally one full golang app that burst forth from my head and written in ~2 weeks, complete with all the instrumentation and middleware that I struggled previously with in the past. I’m still learning. Tooling is great; I think only rust’s tooling is better. It’s spawned more apps as ideas to write.

Python. uv has made a lot of things more bearable. Poetry has become more bearable. Other than that, it’s python; I miss being able to do the typical work with the data science libraries that I had fallen in love with when I first started Python. I am currently writing a library that no longer defaults to pandas anymore, but rather polars; the world is changing.

Navigation on 2 laptops, 4 OSes (3 if you consider ubuntu and debian one and the same) and 3 programming languages; at this point my left hand does not know whether or not it needs to hit the fn, ctrl, command, windows, or option key. I preferred the macbook pro at the beginning of the year for its satisfying weight and massively long battery life; at the end of the year I enjoyed the framework laptop running (quite boringly) ubuntu more, mostly because the portability despite its battery life made it far more preferable to reach for. Having to also repeat the installation/setup experience more than a few times at work has also left me somewhat indifferent to setups. I pretty much use default setups (terminals, editors, etc) and have nearly no aliases set up either because it’s too much work to play the laptop equivalent of house when you have five or six or seven of these to setup. This indifference has also translated itself in code style: I try not to import anything or add new packages to apps if I can help it. I don’t have strong opinions on the tools or languages I use anymore; one can adapt to almost anything and so dislike technical religious wars (I say almost; my opinions on cloud generally remain unchanged.)

AI. I hated on OpenAI earlier this year, and still do. Claude made me change my mind. The rest I have no opinion on. They all tend toward hallucinations or overly complex frameworks but if you keep your questions scoped extremely tightly, they are extremely helpful to bounce back and forth on ideas. Like having an overly bright and eager intern but one you have to keep in check. I have found them extremely helpful on building skeleton builds in new languages and coming back to it to check on what the language conventions are (e.g., how file directories are named, tooling, standard libraries, etc). More or less gets me up to speed on figuring out language conventions without having to google relentlessly. Used it the other day to get back into Java and found it to be a very painless experience, even with the new addition of learning to use maven. I’ll come back on this to see if it’ll aid me on C++ where imo the worst part is the tooling and weird conventions.

Math. Math academy is very good and I forgot how much I enjoyed rote exercises, because there’s really no better shortcut to build intuition. I made it all the way up to Sapphire ranking and then dropped back down to Iron mostly when I went back to work. It’s hard to keep up in multiple subjects intensively so dialed it back a lot.

Books. I read over 200 books this year. Not a new high, and mildly disappointing for me as they were mostly filler. The theme next year will be heavily into nonfiction, judging from the layup I have on my kindle. Standouts this year were Crucial Conversations and Tidy First.

Games. Closed the year with 0 started and 0 completed. I think I would like to revive this hobby again, to be honest.