2023 Annual Review

In 2023 I spent most of my time on work, learning and dating. Compared with the last year, devoted less time on this blog and community. It might be a pretext but to be honest, writing a blog post always consumes a lot of my energy, especially when there was a lot of overtime this year. Anyway, I should write more posts in the new year, and I’ll try to write some non-technical posts (well, partially because they’re easy to write (and read)).

Let’s talk a little about professional skills over here. In the past, I focused most of my efforts on coding skill, rather than engineering skills, or let’s say, the business skills. This is because I love the hacker spirit, and am fascinated by intricate program structures and algorithms. But your boss just need one who solve problems, them don’t care about computer science. To solve a problem, you have to consider many things other than the computer - namely, the people around you. And that’s exactly what software engineering does - to use some engineering methods to prevent or eliminate mistakes made by humans. So when I focus on hacking, I must keep an open mind on other skills, especially those methodologies for problem-solving.

Goals

• Keep up learning English
• Read Understanding the Linux Kernel (I’m not sure if I can finish it)
• Keep up daily LeetCode exercises
• Keep up writing blogs, basically one post a month
• Read some non-technical books
• Keep up exercises

Learning

I finished learning Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP), an amazing book. Its content comprised of functional programming, layering of program and data structure, OOP, infinite streams, the metacircular evaluator, lazy evaluation, compilation principle, etc. I have to say, SICP opened the gate of computer science for me. Before then, I don’t really comprehend the essential of computer science.

sicp

LeetCode

I kept on doing LeetCode like the past few years. The grid looks not bad.

leetcode

Now I’ve solved 1182 problems. Last year it’s 912, so I solved 270 problems in 2023.

Language

I kept learning English in 2023, as I did in the past few years. After continuously learning vocabulary on the APP baicizhan for 2024 days, I found it might not be a very effective way to memorize new words for me at the moment. Therefore, In November, I started learning Merriam-Webster’s Vocabulary Builder. This book organizes words by their roots, besides telling you how to use a word, its history, and related knowledge.

webster

I also read another amazing vocabulary builder, Word Power Made Easy. To me, this book like an introduction to the etymology and at the same time teaches you how to memorize over 3,000 words and continue building your vocabulary.

webster

In addition, I kept leaning Japanese on Duolingo as I did in 2022.

webster

Creating

I only wrote 6 posts on the blog.

I created a repo luyuhuang/nvim, but it’s just for personal configuration, should not be considered as a contribution. I submitted some pull requests and issues to the community and some of have been accepted.

Something Happy

Hiking and seeing the skyline of the city at the summit is quite happy, especially with the one you love.

webster

Finally

At the end of a year, I always feel time flies by quickly. But after I wrote the annual review, I found that the time of a year is quite long, because you can literally do many things in a year and grow quite a bit in certain aspects (say, I found my English writing skill is much better than the last year). So in the new year, keep learning and growing, and I believe we’ll get a better result. Happy New Year to everybody.