2023 In review
Some Books Read, in Brief
Tiny Beautiful Things - "Reach hard for the life you want."
Witch King - So fun!
The Frugal Wizard's Guide to Surviving Medieval England - Excellent, fun, unexpected. Money quote, "Never apologize for your joy."
Southern Reach Trilogy - Mind bending, Lovecraftian horror mixed with spy thriller. But third book drags a lot.
Silo Trilogy - Excellent.
Murderbot Diaries - Excellent.
Shade's Children - Not Nix's best.
Ghost Priate Gambit & Artemis City Shuffle - Fun romp.
Children of Time - Thought provoking evoloutionary scifi with a surprisingly personal story.
The Electricity of Every Living Thing - Illuminating 1st person POV on autism + long distance hiking.
Deep Work - My review. Problematic and would recommend Atomic Habits instead.
The Dragon Keeper - Fun but forgettable.
Elder Race - Interesting.
The Wild Robot Escapes - Deeper than it first appears.
Black Powder War & Throne of Jade - Fun series, get's repetitive.
Sorcery of Thornes - Fun.
Hands on Rust - Too focused on the library over the language.
Crafting Interpreters - Best programming book ever.
Personal Dev
I had a plan to build 10 mini game demos in 2023 but that didn't happen. Instead I picked up Crafting Interpreters and it led me down a very deep rabbit hole. After working my way through the book I spent most of the year designing a programming language. Some folks say that designing syntax is not a good use of time (see Bikeshed. But since this project was solely for my own enjoyment I decided to lean into whatever I found fun and spent a ton of time thinking about syntax. Also wrote some amount of parsers, compilers, interpreters and virtual machines in python, rust, zig, C and C++. And, studied the lua source code and papers on register allocation and garbage collectors. It's been fun and I hope to share some of this work (because, why not) in 2024.
Another unplanned activity was porting my text editor to C++. See progress in the The Quest.
Towards the end of the year I picked up my Scavenger's game concept and have been making progress toward a playable demo with a crafting interface. Hopefully a playable demo in 2024.
Hiking
Hiking went really well this year. I hiked every month of the year except February, volunteered with the WTA and climbed Mt. St. Helens. Spent a total of 10 nights backpacking, including a trip in January, some miles of the PCT section H, a trip to Trapper Creek wilderness, and the highlight, 6 nights in Eagle Cap Wilderness. Climbed Eagle Cap (over 9000'), swam in alpine lakes, saw mountain goats and big horn sheep. I set two PRs for distance: 14 mi w/ weight, 20 mi w/o weight and totaled over 300 miles, nearly doubling last years 162.