TL;DR:
A personal retrospective of 2023

2023 was a rough year

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I usually enjoy doing these yearly posts, looking back at what I did and planning what I’ll do, but 2023 was a rough year. I’m glad it’s over.

Took trainings

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In France, when working for the private sector, you get money poured yearly in a fund for training in case you want to learn new skills. This fund is capped and I had never used it since I began working, which means that every year I was actually losing 500EUR of funding. I was still taxed for it, so I decided to take some trainings and make good use of that money.

I really wanted to learn about music production and VR, so I submitted a request for a training in music production and… supposedly VR development which turned out to be 3d modeling because it’s ok to mislabel trainings I guess :-)

Music production

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I did 2.5 weeks of music production training, full time, and it was really awesome. I learnt a lot of theory, had a lot of practice, got daily assignments and got to share with professional musicians on various topics.

I can’t possibly sum up all I learnt, it’s unvaluable, but I feel like it’s the best training I ever had in my life after my training in hypnosis.

As these funded trainings are certified, I eventually had to make an original production and a remix for an evaluation by a jury, and while it was tough due to the very short time I had to do it, I managed to do both and get certified.

3d modeling with Unity

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I did 2 weeks of 3d modeling training with Unity, where I basically had two hours of training conducted by a trainer each morning, then had to organize my own work so I could complete the daily assignments. I couldn’t take time off work for this training, so I mostly worked on the evenings and nights which led to a lot of sleep deprivation.

The training was ok, I learnt a lot of things, but quite frankly I didn’t enjoy it as much as the music production training, mostly because the training was supposed to be about VR development… and it wasn’t. I was still interested in the topic of 3d modeling, but I felt like I was misled and the only real benefit was that I got to learn how to use Unity.

I did a TON of modelings like these:

A bit or augmented reality, like floating a cube over my coffee mug:

but I didn’t really get to do any VR development which is a shame.

This training was also certified, I had to take a timed exam to model a scene and then present it to a jury, which I did and got certified.

Wrote a ton of code

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I wrote a ton of code.

I can’t even remember all the things I did this year, but I wrote a lot of code, that’s for sure.

I worked a lot on my plakar project, I worked on improving the FastCDC chunker implementation, I worked on implementing the UltraCDC chunker algorithm. I wrote a set theory database PoC, a PoC for an interpreted language… which I then wrote a compiler and VM for. I wrote a music language (earmuff) and an interpreter for it, then an AI-powered music assistant that could plug into a DAW and generate MIDI. I wrote a MIDI software router. I wrote a PoC for a decentralized twitter alternative. I wrote the first bricks of a Golang MTA.

That’s just the things I can remember.

I kept my mind busy as much as I could, I didn’t want to think about anything else.

Failed to build a guitar

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I wanted to build a guitar, tried and failed.

It looked nice:

It sounded shit and eventually the string tension broke the neck.

Put arabic learning on hold

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I had to put arabic learning on hold as I lost my arabic teacher, and couldn’t find anyone serious for that dialect.

ma fi mechkle, ra7 camel t3alam la 7ale ma3 netflix w chatGPT.

Hopefully I can make progress on my own.

Put my hypnotherapy business on (permanent ?) hold

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After we lost our baby, I put my hypnotherapy business on temporary hold so I could mourn, take some time to focus on my family and recover.

I was supposed to reopen late 2023, but I realised I want a longer break and am no longer so much invested in helping others. I’ve spent 7 years doing and studying hypnotherapy, it is one of the best skill I learnt in my life, but these last years I’ve only focused on using it for others and not for myself.

I know hypnosis will remain a big part of my life as it has changed it for the best, but I don’t know if I’ll ever do hypnotherapy again, time will tell.

Taught Python/OOP to students

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I was offered to teach Python and OOP to students at a local school, and I accepted because I wanted to keep my mind busy and I like teaching.

How’s 2024 going to be ?

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I don’t know what 2024 will be made of, can’t possibly be worse than 2023, but I’m not expecting much really.

I intend to take care of my son the best I can, continue learning new skills, continue writing code, and definitely not build a new guitar.

I picked an interest in ARM64 assembly, I might do something with that. I also want to learn more about music theory and composition, and I want to learn more about VR development.

I hope 2024 will be a good year.