Wow it’s been another year. This year, a lot of things have changed.

Life

This year, I’ve finally reached my age of 16! I’ve gone to Nanjing twice, visited a lot of places of interest; I’ve also met some of my friends which we originally met online offline :), which is a big step forward towards my relationship circle.

There aren’t really many things to be written about my life, cuz there’s really nothing important happening :(. Everyday seems to be the exact same.

Blogging

This year, I’ve only written 9 posts, and there’s NONE after September… High school life is busy, and next year is expected to be even busier.

However, there’s good news. It’s great to hear from all of you… Whether it’s your email expressing thanks, or a text message regarding my posts. All of which I appreciate a lot. Thanks, this is why I continued writing :)

As you can see from the Google Analytics, the user activities dropped sharply after I stopped updating on September. But overall it’s a great sign. And it’s nice to see that my site has grown to a point where it can rank pretty high in the search engines without special optimizations, with proper keywords.

Coding

Shamelessly speaking, I really didn’t do a lot of coding work this year, partly because I’m just too lazy. I did helped my friends with some scripts and some projects, but I really didn’t write any code for myself, not big projects at least.

There are a lot of pending projects, so I’d try to catch up next year :)

Oh, also, Python remains my primary language, which is bad since Python is a programming language that requires a interpreter and is very low-efficient in some ways (e.g. basically no multi-thread utilization without very complex coding). I will get started with Golang next year, hopefully to switch to Golang. :)

Philately

This is the new hobby I’ve just picked up this year.

Though I already started collecting letters and envelopes and postcards last year, but I didn’t systemically started doing those things. But this year it’s very different.

I’ve joined Postcrossing in March and started to do postcard-swapping. Currently I’ve swapped more than 20 cards from all over the world. This is the thing that makes me happier than ever. You never know if there will be a card suddenly appear in the mailbox downstairs, from whatever person and whatever country. I just love that feeling of surprise.

Taking everything into considerations, I’ve in total received 50 domestic letters, 28 domestic postcards, 3 domestic printed matters, 10 international (and HK, MO and TW) letters, 29 international postcards, and 3 international parcels, all via the postal service.

I’ll try to make a gallery exhibiting all these things, so stay in tune.

Despite receiving, I also send a lot of letters and postcards. Funnily enough, the local post office has already know me, and I’ve made a lot of 1st-s, like international registered parcels (starts with C, which I was surprised to know that they’ve never dealt with), inquries (form CN08), and so on. It feels good to communicate with people in all industries, and I’m glad to know the inside of many industries, which is far from what the average people could see and understand.

Finance

Unsurprisingly, this year I’m still in net loss, which is kinda normal due to the fact that I don’t even have a proper job as a high school student. But there IS income, not just pure expense, which is already a big step forward. Next year, I hope to make more money (very straightforward huh).

Mental

This is quite a strange topic to say, but many of you may already know that my mental health is never in good condition. It’s sad to say that it didn’t become any better this year, partially because the intense stress by both school and family, the latter is the origin of evil. (period)

However, I feel appreciated to know all of you, and being with all you guys makes me feel that there’s a point for me to live. Thanks… :)

I think I’ve also got a little bit of paranoid, presumably because that I’ve known too much, like the mass surveillance. Though it’s never a bad idea to be cautious.

Reading?

Didn’t find a lot of good books to read, nor did I have time for those. But I did read Permanent Record by Edward Snowden. That’s a great book, I’ve read it twice.

Infrastructure

Have changed a lot since last year, it can be concluded with one word, Simple. The infrastructure has become very simple, hosting this blog completely static and putting the rest in containers, in one machine. And the most mission-critical is redundant in different countries, completely encrypted.

Encryption and security played a major part this year, I’ve no longer just considered the convenience, but also the security, because that is what actually matters.

Other BS

Yeah, it’s no doubt that this year is an amazing and unprecedentedly life-changing year. Though there were a million unhappy things, but those were all gone with the wind.

Summarizing

That’s all for 2024, not a lot of interesting things, at least on me myself. Next year, I hope everyone can be whoever they want to be, and have whatever they want, and deserve to have. As for me? Well, I gotta hope, just hope…

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