Welcome to the end of year post. We will discuss how the year went and where I would like to take the next year. Plans for the year usually lasts until about the end of January.

The first half of the 2022 was focused on my health. At the start of the year I was not in a good place physically. A lot of changes were required but gradually things improved but there is still a long way to go.

Getting back onto a low carb diet and keeping the intermittent fasting going are the priority. This should facilitate more weight loss without too much extra effort. My ability to concentrate goes through the roof as well.

The second focus of the year was self development. Improving my technical skills.

I took the route of working through a collection of technical books. I managed to work through about 3000 pages and answered nearly all the question in any book I read. This included books on Haskell, Rust and Mechanical engineering (Python).

I have not managed to get through that much content since university days so it feels like a success. I finish the year with less books in the stack than when I started. A nagging feeling is I didn't do enough to cement in the information and perhaps I would have been better off spending some time writing about what I was learning. If you can explain it you understand it.

I had a number of small dives into pixel art and some basic machine learning. I would like to do more of both of these in the coming year.

In 2023 I am going to continue this self development journey but with slightly less emphasis on number of pages and more on report writing.

If I am to write I should spend at least some time on improving my written skills.

Self development, while fun, should not be an end in itself. Here I do not have concrete plans other than the desire to work on some longer projects.

It may be I finally get round to working on the long list of game ideas I have or perhaps finally make some progress on the programming language I want to create. Having longer running projects creates interesting challenges you don't get when work on small learning bits of code.

I would like to try and set up some process here, simple stuff like try to work on it nearly every day. Focus on results/output rather than viewing things through my own personally biased lens of what is good tech.

Initially I will focus on process and try to hit a rhythm of producing. Plans should get more concrete as we head towards the end of January.

I was expecting to write more but I appear to have covered everything. I guess I should get on with my end of year break.