2023 Retrospective: A Year Of Personal Growth

Started the 2023 with the goal of publishing at one article per week. It would be 52 articles. And I accomplished this goal.

Every year we set goals and have expectations. I want a goal that would be under my control, because I didn't want to finished this year feeling like a could not accomplished anything. It was up to me to write and read every day to publish 52 by the end of the year. At first was easy because I was motivated, but it takes discipline and consistency to reach this goal. I struggled with the motivation, and lack of ideas. A lot of my articles were reused to write another articles, for example, I wrote many tutorials about Prometheus, I write an article for using it with Python, one for Go, and for Rust too.

When doing this I felt like a cheater, the only though that comfort me was that probably one of that articles was useful for someone else.

My consistency was put at a test when I found a job. I started to work at mid of November. And it was difficult to me to find time and energy to write an article, and because mostly what I write are tutorials, I have to find time to write code and test the programs for the articles.

I learned a lot by writing articles in this year. I learned about how to use Prometheus, Grafana, Docker, RabbitMQ, Apache Pulsar, Ktor. I started to learned about cybersecurity, a topic I want to write about in the 2024.

Also I continue to be more involved in contributing to Open Source projects. That was another goal that it takes discipline and consistency, but totally worth it. I'm very grateful to all the contributors and maintainers for helping me when I struggled with an issue, thanks to them I feel I did grow a lot this year as a developer. Especial thanks to the Robyn community for been so nice and welcoming.

I didn't find a job as a software developer, but that is something that is not totally under my control. What is actually under my control is to continue to apply for jobs and continue learning, to grow as a software developer and as a person.

I want to thanks to those who read my articles. Their likes, comments and feedback encourage me to continue to keep writing and help me to be a better writer each day.

This was a short article, a brief summary about how my 2023 was. Thanks for reading this article.

Happy New Year.

Carlos Armando Marcano Vargas