Year 2023 in review

Usually, when the year ends, I take stock of things we did on the foundation pillars(work, health, and family) write a summary in my private journal and share the public ones. Going by the entries, 2023 seems to be the year of milestones for us.

• This is going to be my 8th year in review.
• I've been journaling for the past 9 years.
• The domain sridhar.co is 10 years old.

Work

The learning system that I built last year is serving me well.

• Learnt about Two-Phase Commit, Paxos, and Raft distributed consensus ideas.
• Discovered prismjs, a 15 KB lightweight utility for code syntax highlighting instead of using Github gists.
• Discovered mermaid.js(.mmd file) for creating and embedding diagrams within the github repo. eg: TwoPhaseCommit.mmd
• Read and cleared bookmarks: from 10257 to 7425.
• learnt Basics of Google Cloud Platform.
• published summary of Rich Dad Poor Dad.
• published 27 weekly issues.
• published 4 versions(1.5.10, 1.5.11, 1.5.12 and 1.5.13) of onebible

I'm going to make only one change to my system. Dust off my RSS reader and start adding blogs, youtube channels to manage them in a single place.

In terms of My toolbox, I made three changes.

• After having multiple false starts with learning Vim and emacs, I've realised that mastering an editor is a lifetime pursuit. You need to strike the right balance between learning the editor vs being productive. Doom emacs seem to have the right set of defaults that can make you productive instead of tinkering the editor. so far going good.
• Moved to VS Code for all my JS/React/Python.
• Started using Google Keep for all ephemeral notes.

I read the following books.

1. The Dhandho Investor: The Low-Risk Value Method to High Returns by Mohnish Pabrai
2. Wit and Wisdom from Poor Richard's Almanack by Benjamin Franklin
3. Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity by Peter Attia
4. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein
5. Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! by Robert Kiyosaki - My notes.
6. Life Without Principle by Henry David Thoreau - My notes || 2nd reading

The biggest highlight of the year was meeting Derek Sivers on Valentine's Day when he came to Chennai.

This year I donated to the Free Software Foundation, Wikipedia, and Mozilla.

Health

The single best thing that has increased my mobility is going office. I walked 1.8x more steps than when I worked from home.

Except for a medical challenge, I was fairly regular to the office. I'm learning and experimenting more with health routines optimizing for energy, see family section.

Family

After understanding NPS and learning how it compares with index funds, I added NPS to my financial strategy. Rest all stays the same.

Dhruvan had a couple of firsts in 2023

• He visited Chennai Book fair for the first time. His picks were a globe, a storybook (because it had two horses on the covers) and a bag of toys. We started with the stories from the book as bedtime stories but soon realised he had a different expectation. He likes Spiderman + Batman and Paw Patrol to save the world from cruel Mayor Humdinger, and robo cars taking on monster trucks. Partly inspired by her brother, Aaradhana wants crocodiles to take on dinosaurs and elephant finger family songs. We would have never imagined our bedtime stories taking such wild turns each day ;)
• He had first first-ever summer vacation for real. We went to my in-laws place. Every day had an agenda. Hot noon had cool rose milk, ice creams and Badam milk. Evenings had cricket(IPL) for entertainment. It sort of reminded my vacation during my school days. Nostalgic.

Appa-amma had moved in with us. kids: Dhruvan, Aaradhana and their cousin Adhiyan are having a blast with playing with them every day.

Except for attending the marriage of a close friend to Trichy, I didn't travel much. We had plans to visit a few places down south of Tamil Nadu. But December weather thought otherwise. So Lakshmi insisted we continue our theme of visiting natural scenic places. Last year it was beaches and aquariums in Chennai, so this year we picked a hill station.

One noticeable observation is that, be it attending functions, during vacation, or just going out in general. My exercise routine is no match for the kids' energy levels. I and Lakshmi are experimenting with health routines that would help us to achieve this need. Maintaining the Energy level throughout the day is our only goal, everything else seems unnecessary. So in this phase of life, our goal is to try matching (50% from each of us) the energy levels of kids ;)

Previously 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2014