My 2023 in Review

As we move in to 2024 I wanted to take the opportunity to reflect on 2023, to identify what went well, what did not, and to set some foundations for the year ahead.

Planning

Having set SMART objectives at the beginning of the year would have made it really easy to reflect on the year that has passed. Having not done so makes it really hard to objectively measure performnce... so I will set some specific objectives where I can for 2024.

Work

Work was an unmitigated disaster.

In January 2023 I left a role that I had been very successful in across a number of years, to work for another consultancy. All that I can say on this topic is that the role did not have the seniority and profile or autonomy that I expected and thrive under.

I left at the end of the year to take up a position as Head of Technical Services at another consultancy that I have a lot of respect for and trust in. So 2023 was 💩, but the year ahead is an exciting one professionally.

Fitness

I entered 2023 weighing 81.77kg, and exited at 84kg. That does not tell the full story though, peaking at 86kg in June, my weight has been gradually falling from there into the end of the year.

I spent 170h training in 2023. From a promising position at the end of the summer, COVID and a deteriorating work-life combined to make for a pretty miserly end to 2023 - just 19 hours of activity in the last three months of the year.

Of those 19 hours, 4 were at one of my target races for the year - the Manchester Half Marathon, which I walked. It really illustrates just how badly the end of the year went.

I have always used my fitness metrics as an indicator of the strength of my work life balance, and mental wellbeing - the peaks and troughs in that data show how consuming the year was at times.

Software Development

In January 2023 I completed a software engineering course with HyperionDev.

I didn't set any objectives around this, but I'd have expected to kick on and learn more in 2023. There were probably some really obvious starting points as well, that course being threadbare on Flask and Django in particular.

I have learned a little through the year. Moving and consolidating all of my websites into a single site on Micro.Blog has meant that I have had to learn quite a bit about the Hugo static site generator on which it sits. That has culminated in me designing almost all of my own theme from scratch, which starts to think innovatively about how to make Micro.Blog do things that would have been much easier if the YAML frontmatter were exposed.

This is not completely new. I have built much more complex sites / data structures in Jekyll on Github Pages in the past. I think this is the most comprehensive theme that I have ever written though, without using third party components like bootstrap.

Social Media

At the end of 2022 I spent quite a lot of time looking for places to write with communities around them. I stumbled across micro.blog, I also spent quite a bit of time looking at write.as, I looked at Ghost, and probably a few others too.

I found micro.blog intriguing, and though the web presence has been much improved over the last year, I really couldn't work out why everybody on Micro.Blog had built Hugo Websites. Once I realised that I could both write to an audience, and to do that through my own websites, I was pretty sold.

I wrote about this more at the time, but have used micro.blog and its activitypub capability to eliminate more nefarious social media sources from my life.

That process is not complete though.

• I still have Facebook, Instagram and Threads accounts. I need the former mainly for the various virtual cycling groups I am in that organise themselves there. Maybe after the Zwift Racing League is finished for the year I will be able to do something about that. I do not need either the instagram or threads accounts.

• I also still have a LinkedIn account. I probably need to retain that for professional purposes, but need to be much more effective in my usage, avoiding doomscrolling there.

Conclusions

2023 was a really tough year, physically, but mentally as well. I've probably been to darker places in the last year than I ever have before, so it is cathartic to look back over on the year now. I think that I'm much better placed, and positioned in a much better place, for the year ahead. So turning to the year ahead:

Objectives for 2024

Fitness 260 training hours (5 per week) excluding walking
Running Sub 1:45 Half Marathon at Great North Run
Running Sub 23min Parkrun / 5km
Weight Sub 78kg at year end
Financial Reduce net debt
Software Develop a specific niche wee application that I've had in mind for a while - which means that I need to learn the technology to deliver it
Interweb Hibernate Facebook/Instagram/Threads accounts, consolidate fitness data into the Suunto app as the primary source.
Digital Garden Complete upload of missing mountain photographs from 2004-9
Home Be kind

Happy new year, see you on the other side!