My 2023 Programming Progress

In 2023 I just didn’t have the urge to do as much programming as in years past. I felt more of a tug towards video games, reading, and baking/cooking. So this recap will be quite a bit shorter than usual. A couple upfront themes and ideas: The programming was essentially Go and Python. I started reading a book about Julia, but didn’t do any new programming in Julia. I mostly worked on new code vs maintaining older code.

Jan-March

This was the busiest period of coding in all of 2023. In January and February I did a lot, more heavily weighted towards February. January started off with work on my last.fm end of year script. I imagine January 2024 will also feature work on the various scripts I use for my end of  year blog posts. February, as you can read from the link, involved work on the following Python projects: Civ VI Play By Cloud and Snap_in_Time. It also was the beginning of my first useful Golang project when I finally got my Dreamhost script rewritten in Go. Because every Python upgrade requires redoing all the virtual environments, my success here has convinced me that I may want to rewrite all my cron service scripts in Go or Rust and leave my user-initiated scripts in Python.

In March, I finished up the Dreamhost DNS script. I then worked on some Extra Life quality of life improvements.

Over this first quarter I also worked on Advent of Code. Unlike prior years, work on those puzzles dropped off until December.

April-June

The only programing here was me deciding I wanted to write a GUI program for Space Traders. Space Traders is a game played completely via API calls. Go’s way of handling JSON made this a slog. Also, there isn’t a good GUI for making GUIs in Go, so I eventually got bored of working on the project.

July-Sept

After a couple music updates to Funkwhale caused me to lose music data, I wrote up a script to backup the database before updating the music. A relatively simple script, but it has saved me from countless headaches.

While waiting in the airport on the way to Gophercon I worked on a few more endpoint for the Space Traders game.

Oct-Dec

In November I found out that Inthe.am was going to go away. So I started work on a single-user replacement written in Flask - taskwarrior-web. I think I have everything working well. Now comes the hard part - setting up the server. It’s notoriously hard to do well. Depending on how things go once I get that set up, I may do some more programming on this project early in 2024.

In December I started doing this year’s Advent of Code. But, for some reason, the spark just wasn’t there for me. Eventually I focused more on cooking, baking, and playing Against the Storm (my December almost literal addiction).

• Golang
• Python