2022 Yearly Review

Projects
- The Lab
- BlockDB
Writing
- The Power of Time Tracking
- Note Taking in Anki
Media
- Books
- Movies
- TV
- Podcasts

Projects

This year was, on the whole, a quiet one for personal projects. While I did work on two small endeavours, the majority of my focus on this blog was focused on a major re-design, an upgrade to the infrastructure of the blog (now uses Vite and Eleventy 2.0.0 to build the site), and a lot of thinking about what I want this website to become in the future. Specifically, however, I did undertake the following projects:

The Lab

The Lab was my first attempt at a ‘pop-up’ newsletter—a newsletter published weekly for an intended duration of three months. Ultimately, I found I lost motivation quite rapidly for this project; the 500 words a week was quite achievable but I had not experienced the pressure (imagined or not) of having to write to weekly deadlines with so few constraints.

I managed to create 4 newsletters I am quite proud of but, in the future, believe it would be wise to write around a predetermined theme to make my objective more clear and, perhaps counterintuitively, increase my output by constraining the possibilities of my work.

BlockDB

BlockDB was my attempt at coding with NuxtJS, as I have been interested in seeing what options lie beyond the basic HTML/CSS/JS I typically use for web applications. Although the coding itself was slow going, I learned a lot about the Vue framework and found it a really interesting process.

I think BlockDB could be quite a useful resource for crypto, which currently (as of the end of 2022) lacks hubs which serve as pillars to find crypto-related resources. As I write this review crypto has experienced another serious crash as a result of an exchange (FTX) utilising allegedly fraudulent practices, so it remains to be seen what market is left to be addressed but I feel confident I will work to improve on this site over the course of 2023, if only for the sake of improving my coding knowledge.

Writing

The Power of Time Tracking

The Power of Time Tracking is the best blog post I believe I have written so far. I have spent a lot of time looking into the idea of a ‘quantified self’, which included using a variety of time tracking software, so this post was really good fun as I was able to summarise some key learnings and tie it into a neat package.

At around 4700 words, this was a sweet spot in terms of essay length for me and I’d love to write about four essays of this length during 2023, if I can find enough thought-provoking ideas to explore.

Note Taking in Anki

Note Taking in Anki was written in about a few hours, and I think the quality of the writing shows. This piece was a good reminder, however, in how quickly I can create an unpolished piece of writing, particularly when it relates to ideas I have been mulling over for months.

While I don’t believe this type of essay is fully in alignment with my writing goals (I’m currently aiming to produce highly polished, edited pieces closer to 5000 words), my writing throughput is not nearly enough that I can be disappointed with a piece like this. The key for my writing in the future will be to take something like this and spend more time fleshing out the key ideas already touched on; this essay in particular is extremely fertile ground for novel, useful writing.