We are already in the last week of 2023. This year flew by and so many things happened that I cannot recall all of them. Let us have a look at the highlights of my 2023.
Traveling far and often
Without traveling restrictions, I took my chance and visited many of my favourite places:
- In March I was in Amsterdam for a week. That was long enough to visit a bunch of museums and a few other cities by train.
- In May I went from Copenhagen to Malmö and then took the long route through the south of Norway to reach NDC Oslo. I got everything from summerly warm weather to frozen lakes and snow.
- In September I wanted to take the last chance to visit the Pergamon museum in Berlin. The Ishtar Gate was worth the visit and on my way back I took the route over Prag.
- In October I went back to Ireland for a week. In the 6 years since my last visit the prices exploded. It is still a beautiful country, but it got expensive – especially when you want to visit the famous places.
- In December, the year ended with a shopping trip through Belgium and the Netherlands.
Migrating from .Net 4.8 to 6
The most noteworthy activity this year at work was the migration of our biggest application from .Net 4.8 to 6, then this meant we had to move from the .Net full framework to .Net Core. We run in many unexpected obstacles, but good preparation helped us to move ahead with great success.
Another unplanned activity was to move from Moq to NSubstitute. In the end that took far less time than expected and now we can focus again on writing reliable testes.
Advent of Code
For the first time I could work on all the puzzles of Advent of Code https://improveandrepeat.com/2023/11/advent-of-code-the-fun-starts-soon/ in the same day as they were posted. Some puzzles where fun, many where challenging and a few where beyond my current knowledge of Python. I was thankful to go to Reddit and get the missing parts together from other participants. Some even have posted videos of their solutions, what was a great help to turn the low-level counting approach into an algorithmic solution that was much faster and only used a fraction of the memory of the code I came up with.
I had to do a lot of work with lists and dictionaries, used regular expressions and learned much about caching functions. Overall, this Advent of Code was very challenging, but it forced me to push the limits of my Python knowledge.
Python Friday completed its 4th year
A few weeks ago, I reached the milestone of post #200 for my “little” series Python Friday. Thanks to the Advent of Code, I have a well-filled queue of posts on the Python language, and I am currently preparing a series on FastAPI. There is plenty of content that should help to fill 2024.
10 years of Improve & Repeat
In September 2013 I published the first post in this blog. Over the last 10 years many more posts followed. I am currently running an experiment wit Cloudflare and hope that this will improve the load times of this blog.
2024?
In 2024 I expect numerous changes. There will be new challenges and obstacles to overcome, and I hope that will work out as well as it did in the last few years.
I wish you a happy 2024!