Summary of 2023

Another year has passed. And I need to look back at 2023, to take stock of what I've experienced and where I've moved so that I can effectively plan for the year ahead. You can find out how my 2023 went, for example how I delivered pizza, in this article.

Just like last year, I started 2023 in the Canary Islands in Las Palmas. And I must say that I spend the winter and the winter holidays in warmth and place, where the days are much longer than in the Czech Republic is one of the best ideas. The ideal would be to fly there in early November or October.
You can read how I spent my first winter there in Las Palmas.

I arrived in Las Palmas the previous year. For information on how I ended the previous year, see Summary of the year 2022.

Goals for 2023

• Sport and Health.
• Increase the value of my work.
• To try to find a suitable lady for a long-term relationship.
• To limit traveling so that I have time for other activities and don't constantly change location.
• To spend the whole summer in some big Czech speaking city (e.g. Brno or Prague). Ideally rent an apartment for a year.
• Learn something new for personal use and for work.
• Meet new interesting people.
• To pursue cycling.
• Start martial arts training.
• Take a massage course
• Visit friends within the Czech Republic
• Since I am a VAT payer, to get closer to the new VAT threshold.

Health

My health comes first, so I exercise regularly and eat healthy, and I try to get enough quality sleep when possible. In this regard, the biggest problem is the surroundings and women, because nowadays it is common not to sleep at night.
The times are cruel and so it is necessary to reject anything that is contrary to good health, which means constantly rejecting something. Not smoking and not being in a smoking environment is fortunately already possible today. But drinking alcohol all the time and eating poor quality food or not having time to eat is still sadly accepted as the norm.

Travel

Compared to the year 2022, when I traveled a lot, I decided to be in one place more. So apart from trips to the Czech Republic (always just a few days), Las Palmas and Vienna, I've not been anywhere abroad. Traveling is interesting but very challenging. The main advantage I see is that it is a very intense life stimulus. But eventually one gets tired of traveling.

Las Palmas

Spending the winter of 2021/2022 in Las Palmas was a homecoming, because for the past three years it's been the place, I've spent the most time there, I know it like the back of my hand and I've made a lot of friends there. The local warm weather allows me to take part in various sporting activities on a regular basis, which keeps me fit and makes me want to work. Overall, I stayed there, for a shorter period of time than the previous year, because I didn't get to go earlier and I wanted to go back earlier.

Walking and cycling routes from the winter of 2022/2023 in Las Palmas:

Routes Las Palmas 2023

Vienna

Vienna is my favourite city mainly because of its infrastructure, which is made for people. Here are my 2023 itineraries from the city of Vienna:

Routes Vienna 2023

I would definitely recommend a visit to Vienna's Schonbrunn Zoo. This zoo is nicely decorated and has interesting animals.

Prague

Traveling is fun, interesting, informative and you will broaden your horizons. However, after a while, when you travel all the time, you get bored of travelling.
That's why I decided to be more in one place. In a place where it lives, even if at the expense of a nice environment. For example, Hradec Kralove or Brno is a nice big city where it lives. Vienna or Bratislava is also a very nice city. But in the end I pragmatically chose the biggest Czech city - Prague.
I rented an apartment in Prague and I will see what happens.

You can see how I cycled through Prague in 2023 on the following map:

Czech Republic

I used to go on trips around the Czech Republic, mainly on various trips or to visit friends or relatives. On the following map you can see where I have been cycling everywhere:

Sport

I had planned to take up a martial sport on a regular basis, But due to my workload, and because I don't want to waste time moving around town, plus typically being in a closed gym, I blew it off. I'd rather go outside and get some fresh air, so depending on the situation and the weather I go to a workout area.

Business

From 2024, the VAT registration threshold has moved, so I am trying to attack this new threshold. Because if I had to become a taxpayer there better be a reason to continue.

I gained a new experience: handing over a project. I was moving on to more challenging projects and the client was looking for savings as part of the optimization. So I handed over one project smoothly, allowing me to focus on new challenges. In terms of growth and economics, this was only good for me.

In 2022, I bought a Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 5G phone. The latter became slow after the update. While the previous model Xiaomi Redmi Note 8, worked just as well on. So it was faster. But it has a broken lens. Even after time with more updates, the functionality of Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 has not improved. The phone is an important work tool for me! So I decided to buy something new and with pure Android I bought Motorola Edge 30 and I am satisfied. I'm buying a dual SIM phone on principle so I can use two SIM cards! The Motorola Edge 30 SmartPhone no longer has a jack connector for headphones. But whatever, I already use wireless headphones exclusively with the phone anyway.
Unfortunately, I haven't found any practical headphones other than O2 pods.

I bought a new super monitor Samsung S24H850. It is excellent. You can connect it with USB-C just need a proper cable! At the same time, it serves as a USB hub. Crucial in terms of ergonomics is that the display on the laptop no longer has a higher resolution than an external monitor. Otherwise it would force me to prefer the laptop display. Thus, I prefer the external monitor.

I decided to get a new mouse because work ergonomics is important. For details, see how I chose a new computer mouse.
I got a sturdy laptop stand and monitor holder for my reclining desk, so I now have all three displays pretty high up and plenty of desk space.

I purchased new headphones for my PC JLab Studio Pro and I am happy with these headphones.

Since I wanted a microphone arm, I got a Trust GXT 252 + Emita Plus microphone with an arm at the end of the year.

Since I bought a new TUXEDO Pulse 15 computer in 2023. And I don't use my original desktop MSI B85-G43 and Intel Xeon E3 1226 processor at all anymore, so I turned the desktop into a server. This is where investing in a computer box, which I already had several desktops and home servers in, proved to be a good idea. I just bought up the RAM so I could run virtual servers well using Proxmox. With Proxmox, I can run several different servers on one PC for my own or just testing purposes.

Meetings

I mostly went to professional meetings in Prague. I have also been to Hradec Králové or Liberec.

WarpCamp

WarpCamp is my favourite event that is techy, multi-day and outdoors.

Hackaton

I attended the hackathon as a regular attendee. It was an interesting experience. Since hackathons are typically attended by teams, as an individual I couldn't put together a team. But on the contrary, it turned out to be an advantage to make some MVP (minimum viable product) quickly, it's much easier because it eliminates the time cost of communication and project management.
I implemented an AI project in the healthcare industry: Automatic Generation of Understandable Medical Reports.

Lectures

Since I was in the Czech Republic in the fall, I once again gave my traditional talk at the OpenAlt conference. I also gave a talk at the Phpkari meetup .

Youtube

I wanted to finally reach 1k subscribers on my YouTube channel, so in personal discussions, to those who are interested in working on themselves and learning about technology and especially IT, I said get me a Youtube subscription. Thanks to this, I managed to reach and exceed the coveted number of 1,000 subscribers. However, as I soon found out to turn on monetization has Youtube still need to meet the limit of 4 thousand watched hours. Unfortunately, I have only a little over half of that so far.
I'm quite fond of making a video with some short idea and putting it my TikTok, where it usually gets around 800 views without any problems. Which is a lot more than a YouTube video, which gives me even more work. And ni shorts videos on Youtube don't have some similar viewing numbers. However, I don't notice that TikTok has any business potential/implications for my line of business .

Articles

I have stuck to the plan of one article per month. There are plenty of topics, but time is short and since I'm not a writer and I like quality, creating an article is terribly time consuming for me. Despite this demanding nature, I write articles because at least the technical ones also serve me as documentation and tutorials.

I have redesigned this blog to have language versions. Using AI, I am thus able to automatically translate English and this article into English, Spanish and German.

What I have tried and learned

Once upon a time in the Giant Mountains, when the girls in the pizzeria found out that I could cook very well, they enticed me to help them out.....
This time my friend was looking for people to work in the pizzeria. I had time, so I accepted the challenge to try something new. Basically it was a job for a fast-food chain type company. Mostly I was at the cash register or on an electric motorcycle delivering pizzas. And I tried my hand at making pizza.
Maybe a stupid job for some, but for me it was a relaxation that paid. Yes, economically it was actually lost profit for me. But I tried and learned something new. And since it was a newly opened office, the most interesting part was watching the corporate processes take root.

• In GitLab, I started actively configuring CI/CD. It makes my work more efficient and I'm now providing it to clients as well.
• I've been learning Spanish through Duolingo and Memrise. I also paid for a monthly course with a Spanish teacher.
• Kite surfing is a sport where you have a surfboard and what gives you the energy to move is the kite.
• Upgrade proxmox.
• I've started actively using Proxmox backup server for backups.
• I tried generating images and text using AI.
• I used API ChatGPT.
• On one project, I had to learn how to use the Stimulus JS/UX library.
• I tried running Microsoft SQL Server on Linux. Eventually we migrated it to MariaDB.
• I tried LibreOffice Impress to create a presentation.
• I got to know other people, especially in Prague, because I was there the longest.

Summary

This year went pretty well because I successfully avoided incompetent people. A lot of people wonder why I didn't travel as much, but I had other priorities.

You can find a lot of photos that map not only 2023 my Instagram.