It's January first, and time to look back on 2023 before the New Year cynicism wears off…

The best thing I can say about the New Year is that I'm glad December 2023 is finally over. What a terrible month of sickness, injury, weather, isolation, and drabness. On the plus side, I'm alive and eating cereal on summits, have an awesome family, and I'm not getting bombed or shot at at any point of my daily life. So that's all definitely a plus. From a narcissistic perspective, though, 2023 feels like a bit of a let down. I mean what actually happened, from a narrative perspective? I went on an awesome holiday in June, which now only serves to make me melancholy that I'm not on a holiday galivanting around Europe every other day of my life. Everything else about life feels kind of the same. I still have injuries. I still feel creatively unfulfilled. Now that I'm a year older, do I have anything to show for it?

Some things from 2023 that made me feel alive…

Working 4 Jobs At Once

Maybe a slight exaggeration, but I have most definitely encountered other humans in the workforce that put in less effort at one organisation than I did times four in early parts of 2023. And I'm not a proponent of hustle culture or anything like that. All my efforts were under a single position and salary as a consultant. What made me feel alive about this situation was the insane processing power that my brain reached, beyond even what I thought was possible. I recall one morning I had four 30 minute meetings in a row across the four different assignments. Meetings I was running. And each meeting ran over, meaning zero seconds for context switching before I jumped onto the next Teams call. Over hours I spoke about electoral boundaries and nomination processes, then higher education research programs and publicity for publications, into hospital systems and business continuity patterns, into justice system principles such as the difference between court bail and police bail. People would ask me questions and my mouth was answering correctly while my brain was still trying to understand the problem. And I was right, four times in a row, I added value and advanced projects and I felt useful.

Finished a Short Story

At 9,400 words my latest short story - and only story of 2023 - took nearly a year to write and went through multiple phases of abandonment until I finished the first draft, then the second, then the third. And then I felt it, the endorphins, the satisfaction of weaving all these elements of a story together for a satisfying payoff with consistency, engageable characters, and rich storytelling. Those aren't my words, I read the story to my writers group and they all liked it. That made me feel creative and connected to the rest of the world.

32,000 Users in a Single Day

I've spent a lot of my nights programming on projects that have little traction with the wider world (such as this one) or never get deployed to Prod. Programming pursuits for me are direct competitors for creative writing. I have ideas for websites or utilities I want to make but often fail to fully deliver. I started FT last October and it went live without much fanfare back in May. Since then I have invested many hours adding new features, improving SEO, improving Analytics Integration, and adding Generative AI content.

This has always been an agile project, so it lives on as long as the product owner (me) has ideas for the engineers (also me). But if we are talking about measures of success, I think tracking dozens of people using it simultaneously at the same time as I heard fireworks outside my window was a good one. Waking up New Years Eve morning and seeing thousands of simultaneous users was an even bigger one. I had 31,900 users in a single day. That's more than bradism.com has probably had since 2005. Not only that, but the code itself all worked under load. There were no new errors in the logs, no slow response time. I felt proud and accomplished.

I am not using ad revenue as a measure of success, as the high traffic and click through rate actually caused the chocolate factory to suspend ad content around 5pm, dramatically limiting my earnings. However, having such a successful revenue spike - 3000% over my daily average for December - is kind of a measure of success in itself.

Venice

I mean, the whole month of Europe was almost peak human existence. There were a few occasions where I was disappointed by not being able to find a painting in a gallery or missing out on a ferry ride around a lake (and many short beds), but these moments were so minor, as fleeting as my own existence in this giant universe, that I have to think hard to recall them. What I mostly remember was feeling free and piqued. The scenery was gorgeous. The history and culture on display was fascinating. I was in control just enough such that every day felt like an adventure without ever being scary.

What I also enjoyed about this trip was that the longer it went on the better my body felt. My back and hamstring and especially my wrist all unclenched from their constant nagging and pain. Maybe it was the relaxation, maybe getting away from computer screens, who knows. Twelve months on from my SLB surgery in 2022 I was using my wrist for lugging suitcases and cameras up mountains and stairs and along cobbled streets. I felt rewarded for all the hours of rehab and stretching and strengthening I'd been so disciplined at performing each week.

Paying Someone To Upgrade My Shower

For over three years in my current house I tolerated the shitty showerhead in the cramped, falling apart shower cubicle we had in our bathroom. In early 2022 I bought a replacement shower head to install, but I lacked the confidence to drill holes in tiles to install it. Eventually when the screen door fell off enough times I finally went through a process of researching replacement options, getting quotes, negotiating a price and time, arranging installation and then having holes drilled for my new shower head as well. None of this was exceptional or special. It was just a normal, everyday process of interacting with traders in a modern society and the fact that I executed it made me feel like I was a valid member of said modern society. Also standing under that new showerhead in that new, roomy shower cubicle with hot water hitting not one but two shoulders at the same time felt luxurious.

Runner Ups

Walking up hills. Generating perfect content in bulk instantly with the right GPT prompt. The times my dog does something awesome. Sunset walks with my wife. Coffee of the right strength, heat and volume just when my body needs it most.

However

Through no fault of my own, of the four jobs I was working in May - one project was delayed indefinitely, one went nowhere, one took six months to go somewhere, one I was cut out of completely for commercial reasons. I invested a lot of time and energy into IT projects in 2023 and I feel like not a lot actually made it to production enough to leave me satisfied. Except FT, where an idea for a feature can be designed, built, tested and deployed in a matter of hours. Sadly, the suspension of my ads on New Years Eve did give me a sour taste about that whole thing. So much effort that finally hits a jackpot, and then the whim of some basic counting algorithm ruins it all.

I submitted my new story to my dream market and it was rejected within 12 hours. Did they even read it? Probably not. Did I receive a reminder of why creative pursuits are completely unrewarding? Probably yes.

As good as Summer number one in June was, by Summer number two in December my injuries had returned. Sickness ruined nearly every plan I had. Meanwhile, another year around the sun - and the books I read during it - were only making it clearer to me how inconsequential my existence is. As the universe continues to scale horizontally and vertically, I am a mere spec and it's becoming more apparent that I do not contribute anything unique and valuable to the world. I do not improve society. I do not create art or tools that really enrich the human canon. I can barely interact with my peers. After all that, I'm basically where I was twelve months ago.

At least it's still nice under the showerhead. That hasn't been ruined for me yet. And it was still better than 2022.

I read 44 last year, and that was with a month off during June for travel.

I finished my second book of 2024 this afternoon, Pax by Tom Holland. Another history book that was very interesting, but it's questionable how much of what I learned I'll actually retain. The tale of Sporus, most definitely… I'd hoped that having actually visited Rome now might help me feel more connected to the past when reading about it, but it did not really. So much changes during the lives of these people - including their names - that immersion two millennia later was always going to be a whimsy.

Reading less books should ideally reduce these feelings of over-consumption and disconnection. This will mean I enjoy the books I do read more, and maybe listen to the kind of song numbers this year that I did back in 2008.

The day after I posted last week's entry about reading less books, I took the lift down to the city streets at lunch with the intent to stay in the shade and stretch my legs. I didn't have anywhere specific to go, and the urge crossed my mind to walk to the city library and look at the books. Those withdrawals came a lot quicker than I expected. I didn't go to the library. I walked on the north and east sides of streets and listened to music instead of audiobooks.

The next day I was at home and it was the perfect lunchtime for sitting outside eating a giant salad and listening to an audiobook. Well perfect is an exaggeration, it was 34 degrees outside and I had to put my bowl in the freezer while I chopped up my lunch so that when I finished preparing it and took it outside the lettuce wouldn't wilt before I finished eating.

My original plan was to read two books each month. But, around that walk nearly to the library I decided that starting February's books a week before February would be okay, as that would still be finishing it in February. February was a lot more than a week away on the twelfth of January, but I started a new book anyway. I promised myself I would only consume this book at the same time I consumed salads on sunny days. With the recent heat wave, this has been every day.

This morning when I was out walking before work I saw this chalked on the sidewalk...

This month I am celebrating my ten year anniversary of being a home owner.
I know that a lot of people might envy me, but a lot of people also didn't have to spend twenty minutes of their evening today searching for a replacement pre-filter sponge for the pump of their backyard water feature either.
And even that doesn't compare to the actual time and cognitive energy that I have dedicated to my home insurer since the roof of the gym was flooded back in November. (That was not related to the pump or my water feature).
I wish there was some compromise between travelling around the world and staying in cool places every night without worrying about maintenance and rates, and always having a safe place to hang up canvases and for Nash to chill.
My first instinct is a houseboat, but I strongly doubt that would involve less insurance, maintenance and flooding issues...

Amazon royalties for copies of my books sold between 2018 and 2023: $6.10

Return from 3 months of ad revenue from a dumb programming project: $250.84

Return from $104 worth of tickets in the $150M Powerball: $97.40

It's 2024 and my job today was to create a custom skill for a cognitive search indexer. The custom skill was to be invoked after the out-of-the-box skills were used to read text and images, convert them into a single file, split it into smaller chunks, and then detect keywords. The problem was that the keywords it extracted were not very business relevant. So, I built a tiny Node JS function app configured with an array of keywords to detect, deployed it to Azure (well, VS Code deployed it to Azure, I just clicked a button).

I then updated my skillset to pass the chunks to this API to detect matches. ChatGPT wrote the Regexes for me, but I was the one that told it what ones to write, and then the one who tested it and found that it had assumed I wanted to look ahead to the end of the chunk even though I clearly said exclude only the next word. But perhaps I'm the idiot because I didn't create an agent grid and have one model executing predefined test cases. There's only so many hours in a day...

I felt motivated to do this today. Partly because it would be a nice change from SvelteKit/TypeScript/Pocketbase/Tailwind development which I did on the weekend, partly because it was cool. Mostly because I had a 4pm meeting to demo it already scheduled.

I did get the indexing working with the new custom field/skillset. It felt good writing that odata query and seeing the filter bring back records with the matching keywords. Alas the demo did not happen because key people were on holiday.

Hopefully the way this is going we will all be on holiday soon. But perhaps I am looking ahead too far.