Thank you to everyone who read my blog in 2023.

2023 in a nutshell

There were not many updates to this blog over the last year because a lot of things happened to me in 2023. Looking back, everything was unreal.

The 2022 - 2023 period was unkind to me and my family. At the end of November 2022, I was on the verge of being deported. This came as a complete surprise to our family and things escalated quickly. I was lucky enough to know the right people and have decent financial backing to lawyer up and get things sorted out. I still can't comment much on the matter as I will be going to court pretty soon. But at least for now, I could guarantee the safety and stability of my family, which is all that matters the most.

So, as you can imagine, 2023 was nothing but an upward journey for me. 😎

I started a new position at BuildBuddy and it has been nothing but amazing. The team is incredibly smart and we have the most amazing customers with unique problems. Working closely with the Bazel ecosystem was but a cherry on top. I am learning new things every day, technical, communication, customer engagement, etc... But most importantly, I get to learn how to reshape my thinking under the constraints of a small startup. The kind of thoughts that my previous experience working for multi-national conglomerates did not expose me to.

I attended FOSDEM for the first time this year. Getting to meet Jaana Dogan, Ed Schouten, Kris Nova, Mat Ryer, and other amazing engineers was the highlight of the trip. Nova's energy was phenomenal to see in person, rest in peace hacker! I didn't like Brussels as much though.

I also got to attend BazelCon for the first time. Such a small event, densely packed with some of the most influential productivity engineers among the top tech companies in the world: Google, Apple, Uber, Stripe, Bloomberg, Spotify, ByteDance, etc... It's incredibly humbling to chat and learn from these folks. The recording of the event is unfortunately a bit poor, but the unofficial hallway track is phenomenal. Munich's weather was incredible as well.

On a personal note, 2023 marked the first time we had the pleasure of hosting our parents in our home. We invited my in-laws, and later my parents over for a short trip and things went great. The folks flew over from Vietnam and we took them to different cities in the Netherlands. They got to experience living here, using public transit, doing grocery shopping, and exercising. Our parents loved it and they are very eager to come back in 2024. This was a big milestone in my adult life: I can now start taking care of my extended family, even just a little.

2023 was a year of maturity for our family. We got to face some of the worst-case scenarios in our previous endeavors and managed to recover. Armed with that lesson, we've re-evaluated our life priorities and formed contingency plans for various scenarios. At the very bottom, our health and financial situation are now a lot more stable. We understand our problems and weaknesses much better than before and are taking steps to gradually improve upon them.

With that, I am going to give 2023 a solid 8.5/10.

A plan for 2024

There are plenty of things to be excited about in 2024. We should "always be cooking" as the kids like to say these days.

As mentioned in my social media, I want to consume less short-form content and more long-form content in 2024. I hope this will allow me to form more coherent thoughts, which, in turn, should allow me to produce better longer-form content. I have been working remotely since 2020 and it feels like my communication, English or Vietnamese, has been going downhill rapidly. Instead of thinking in concrete sentences, I started thinking in keywords, diagrams, and abstract concepts, which are incredibly hard to verbalize. I have a Russian friend, who lives in South East Asia and works remotely from home who shared similar feedback. He attributed it to excessive usage of ChatGPT/LLM but I think it's a general problem: when we communicated with "machines" more than "humans", our brains optimized more toward human-to-machine communication. I think consuming longer-form content and attending more in-person meetups is going to be the recovery path in 2024.

I want to create more content in 2024. We are building amazing things at BuildBuddy and I want to tell you more about them: Bazel, Buck2, Remote Cache, Remote Execution, build rules, containers, virtualization, and more... I have drafts, a lot of them. I plan to publish content on both BuildBuddy's company blog and this one, reserving more casual and personal topics for the latter.

Beyond $DAY_JOB, I am learning a bunch of new things in 2024: I started picking up Chess again. Doing my daily puzzle on Chess.com and fighting with the 1600 ELO bot. I enjoy the mental exercise of chess combined with the low time commitment of a bot game. I could start/stop anytime: breakfast, on the toilet, before bed...

I am also trying to learn how to drive. Our family lives in a tiny city in The Netherlands where public transit has been minimal so having a car would be a good plan B. The Dutch driving exam is notoriously difficult, but I will get it done.

Finally, I am picking up Dutch on Duolingo again. It has been quite fun and useful. Big props to the Duolingo team for such an amazing app.

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Happy New Year to you and your loved ones.

Thanks again for your support in 2023.

Here's to a brighter and more fulfilling 2024 🤗.