2023 Final Review
It’s been another year. The final review has been delayed on my calendar for like two months. But hey better late than never. It’s time to summarize the past year.
Unlike last year, I wouldn’t explain which month happened which event, but in general.
Study
It’s been a year, and this year I have been admitted to the high school which I was looking forward to across all three years in junior high. Thankfully I did it.
Ahh, I gotta say that it wasn’t as relaxed as in junior high for the life in senior high, especially for the education in mainland China, but anyways, I can deal with it with my own ways.
Pretty much it, I guess?
Technology
It was a year that I daily-drive GNU/Linux. Mainly on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and started to try Debian 11 (bullseye) and 12 (bookworm for production use. For a computer (or I should say, potator? (potato+computer)) this suck, Linux makes it usable for me where Microsoft can’t.
I also got to know a lot of interesting technologies that I had never heard of and eventually realizing that they were quite interesting.
Cryptography was a massive part of this year. The transition between not care about privacy at all to encryption everywhere & willing to compromising convenience for privacy happened in this year. Cryptography is essentially mathematics, and I just feel that it’s really fun and useful.
Also, my coding skills had improved over the past year, I gotta thank ChatGPT by OpenAI, and one of my greatest friend who generously offered me with an account with ChatGPT Plus.
I met this friend 2 days ago, and I gotta say, he is a great guy. Follow his channel on Telegram.
Oh yeah, how can I forget about this. I have got some SIM cards, some of them can do data roaming, others are just for receiving SMS. Although I don’t have a phone that can do eSIM, I managed to buy an alternative solution from 5ber, it works.
Still, I gotta thank my friends in Hong Kong SAR, who generously travelled to Sham Shui Po to buy the physical cards for me and mail them to me when eSIM wasn’t a thing in my mind.
Oh yeah, I migrated from WordPress to Hugo a few months ago, leaving my website back to an entirely static website, which is fast and reliable. Also making it Serverless. I no longer have to maintain my Blog server, and never have to worry about the hackers since there is no background processing at all.
Social
I remember saying this earlier that my mental health was never in a stable or even normal condition, and it seemed to be turning worse this year. Due to some objective reasons, I wouldn’t be able to seek help from professionals. I don’t know how to deal with it, even till now.
Friends are a major part in my life, and I don’t feel like going ahead with my life without all of you guys. Thanks to all of you, I love you guys.
Other hobbies?
Many of you might not know that I have been a postal hobbyist. I don’t know how I became interested in it, but like, yeah.
Here are all the mails I have received in the year of 2023. Some of them are domestic, and others are just internationally mailed.
Gaming?
My poor potator literally can’t run any modern games. I mean, with an Intel HD Graphics 620, what else are you going to hope.
I did played Cities: Skylines for a few hours (1, not 2), and I remember I played Grand Theft Auto V for half an hour. My favorite game would be Minecraft. Hanging out with some of my friends in our own Minecraft server is literally the happiest.
I also took over one of my friend’s Minecraft server, whose was also taken over from another guy. I wrote some code for them, mainly about the account registration, it works till today. I wasn’t paid for it, but I guess I enjoyed it.
Feelings
This year no doubt can be one of the most important and changed year so far. I mean, study is still in the first place. But y’all know hobbies are important.
I don’t really think that I’ve done much development in the past year, really not.
Python is easy to write, so most of my projects were written in Python. I was going to learn Go, Rust, or something like C, but I didn’t feel like learning anything cuz I’m just too lazy.
Yeah, I’m just a lazy guy (gal?). You could see that I didn’t write a lot of blog posts, even though I should have a lot of things to share with all of you.
Development of this website
Our site had grown in 2023. Let’s just bring up the statistics.
Hey, it’s not a lot. Compared with January 2024 (which was like 500 new users, for literally no reason), it’s not a lot. But compared with 2022, that’s a lot. At least the requests from search engines had risen a lot.
This could also prove that I was not making any money from it. No ads whatsoever.
I admit that I did made some money from the affiliate links, but quite literally no in 2023, they were all in 2022.
I’m happy with it, at least I was writing some useful contents.
Looking forward
Well, what else am I going to say.
I hope 2024 will be a greater year. Everything can go more smoother… And I hope all of you guys can be like this as well.
I really hope that I can be less lazy than before. When a million things appear on my to-do list, I gotta do them, instead of lying down and watching YouTube.
And… I am going to reach my year of 16, which means, I can do a lot of things that isn’t allowed legally. Half a year to go, let’s sit and wait.
Yeah, pretty much.
Happy new year to y’all!