Revisiting 2023

Intro

Reflecting on the past 365 days, it's clear that 2023 didn't follow the same growth trend as 2022 and 2021 - meaning that I think my progress stagnated a bit, instead of growing at the same rate as previous years. Nevertheless, I learned a bunch of new cool stuff, and changed my perspective and mindset a lot, hopefully preparing for an awesome 2024?!

Summary

Starting the year, I didn't have a lot of time to fully commit to some full-project (due to having the final High-School exams at the end of June), so I did a bunch of small side projects: I created Figma design tutorials, Bento Cards, and Apple AppKit. Made a small game to crack Arc Invite Codes. Started learning SwiftUI (again), by building different projects, like The Eyeballing Game, where you have to guess different design games - inspired by @raunofreiberg. I also made different interactions, like this one.

Took a small break from coding and desing in June, whilst I had the exams (which went good!) - and I got accepted into university. For the remaining of the year, I worked with the wonderful team at Deta - building the future internet OS. I made a lot of prototypes, designs, and features - some of which you can see here. We launched on the 10th of October, after almost two years of intense work (for me) and more than four years for the team. Was super proud of the team, and that a lot of people loved our product. In the meantime, of course that I made more side projects, those one built during internal hackatons: Stacks was launched, a tiny app where you can unveil your arsenal of tools. Build Hani - a minimal HN reader and Beacon - an app to view, build, and send invoices. Will launch those two soon :). All of my projects that I made this year are open source, so feel free to take a peek at the code here.

In October I started university, taking linear algebra, assembly, and more. It's good so far, even though I think you can learn more by doing your own side projects. What I started doing, besides this is to learn about AI, specifically about deep learning. This video - with Ilya Sutskever sparked something in me, that made me start learning about AI. Now I'm just learning and implementing different papers, learning about transformers and more.

Media consumption

Click on the flashcards to discover more about my year. Now we have even more stats!

Advice

Here are some of my key learnings and takeaways from this year:

• What you cannot teach, you cannot understand.
• Have a beginners mind about what might work and what might not. Try new things, constantly.
• Don’t believe in shortcuts.
  • That’s the only way someone else could get rich off of you.
  • Comes from desperation + ignorance .
• Always start from the problem, not the solution.
• There is always competition, always tell the best story.
• Pretend you only have 1hr/week to complete a task.
  • Actually believe this, and you'll move through things much faster.
• When in doubt, always return to the basics.
  • Think often about the midwit meme, the real masters are the ones that go simple.
• Write, and dump anything & everything you have in your brain on a piece of paper.
• Drink more water than you think you need.
• Go with the flow - you never know how today links to your future.
• It's important to pick work that aligns with your natural abilities and deep interests.
• Be confident in your abilities but remain humble.
• Engaging in your own projects is crucial. These projects should be ambitiously exciting and drive your curiosity. Personal projects often lead to great work.
• Aim high but keep your expectations realistic. This balance helps maintain motivation and prevents burnout.

Since my growth took the shape of a log function this year, I want to take revenge next year, and correct it to be exponential again. For this I'll be publishing how to accelerate in 2024, and few tips that I'll follow then.

Thanks for reading friends! Here to wish you a wonderful 2024 full of your wishes!