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 spending the winter and the winter holidays somewhere warm, where the days are much longer than in the Czech Republic, is one of the best ideas. The ideal would be to fly there as early as the beginning of November or in October.
You can read how I spent my first winter there in the article 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 2022/2023 in Las Palmas was like a homecoming, because over the past three years it's the place where I've spent the most time; I know it like the back of my hand and I have 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 manage to set off earlier and I wanted to come back earlier as well.

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 routes from the city of Vienna:

Routes Vienna 2023

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

Prague

Traveling is fun, interesting, informative and you will broaden your horizons. However, after a while, especially when you travel all the time, travelling stops being fun and becomes boring.
That's why I decided to be more in one place. In a place that is buzzing, even if at the expense of a nice environment. For example, Hradec Králové or Brno are nice big cities where things are buzzing. Vienna or Bratislava are also very nice cities. 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 went on trips around the Czech Republic, mainly while travelling for other reasons or to visit friends or relatives. On the following map you can see everywhere I have been cycling:

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 dropped the idea. I'd rather go and exercise outside in the 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 VAT payer, there had 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. It became slow after the update. Meanwhile the previous model, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 8, kept working just as well. So it was faster. But it has a broken lens. Even after time with more updates, the functionality of the 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 a 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, you 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 height-adjustable desk, so I now have all three displays nicely 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 with an Intel Xeon E3 1226 processor at all anymore, I turned the desktop into a server. This is where investing in a computer case, which I have already had several desktops and home servers in, proved to be a good idea. I just bought extra 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 meetups in Prague. I have also been to Hradec Králové and 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, that turned out to be an advantage, because building some MVP (minimum viable product) quickly is much easier when the time cost of communication and project management falls away.
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 Péhápkaři 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 subscribe to me on Youtube. 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 Youtube also requires meeting a 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 on 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 not even shorts on Youtube get similar viewing numbers. However, I don't observe that TikTok has any business potential/results 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 even 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 tried to talk me into helping 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 menial job for some, but for me it was a rest that paid. Yes, economically it was actually lost profit for me. But I tried out and learned something new. And since it was a newly opened branch, the most interesting part was watching the corporate processes bed in.

• 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 are surprised that I didn't travel as much, but I had other priorities.

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