My 2023 as a story

2023 has been another year of ups and downs. The worst happened at the end of the year, when I lost my job. I’ve already blogged about it in “8+ years programming for fashion”. The best of 2023 happened in June, when I got married 👨‍❤️‍👨. But many other good things happened as well.

I’ve been quite busy with job interviews this month, and it feels I’m lagging behind lots of things. I finished Advent of Code in January, and I’m 12 days behind in Genuary. But I guess it’s good to be busy. But I didn’t want January to end without having written a retrospective of 2023. I think it’s always a good exercise to stop and look back, specially to celebrate the achievements. Otherwise it’s easy to get lost in the worries of the present, as if everything is always dark.

Speaking of darkness, I can’t believe last year we spent the new year in Tel Aviv, and this year there’s war going on there… It seems the number of ongoing wars only keeps increasing… ☹️ Let’s go back to positive things.

Apart from our wedding, another highlight of my 2023 were the tripS (plural) to Japan. After almost 5 years, I managed to go to Japan and renew my residence card. I was quite stressed about that since the beginning of the pandemic, so I’m so happy I was able to solve that.

In the first trip, I went for 3 weeks, in February & March. I took some days off, but I also worked remotely. I woke up at 4am, worked from 6am to 10am, then went out & enjoy daylight, and then worked again from 4pm to 10pm. That time in the evening I could have meetings with the team in the UK. I felt a bit tired, but I wasn’t sleepy. I think it was all so exciting that it felt quite nice to make the most of my day.

One random day I saw a random poster of a Kabuki play of Final Fantasy X. Kabuki is a traditional all-male theater, so at first I thought it was quite funny to see the male actors “cosplaying” as some of the female leads. But then I thought this was a very unique opportunity, and I was lucky enough to be there at the time, since it was shown only for a month and a half. So I bought a ticket, I took an extra day off, and I went to see it. It was very long, from 12pm to 9pm, but it was really worth it. One of the best things I’ve ever seen. I was very moved. I wrote about it in my “otaku” blog — in Spanish, though: Final Fantasy X Kabuki.

I visited Japan again in May. It was a very short trip, just 3 nights, tagging along my partner’s work. But our flight back to London was cancelled so we stayed 2 extra nights. Perfect for me 😂 I had brought my work laptop, and there was a WeWork office next to the hotel, so I went there one day. I was able to meet some friends I couldn’t see in March. Again, I felt I made most of my time there. I was very tired after a very long flight, but I arrived in the morning and I directly went to Akihabara, met a friend, he showed me some nice interesting retro places, I did some shopping, then we went back to Yokohama, and there we had a really good time in a local sushi restaurant. I uploaded a YouTube video (Spanish again, but with English subtitles) with the talk we had in that restaurant, talking about my time in the Japanese game industry: Gossip: game devs in Japan, with Ahgueo & Fibroluminique.

As I said earlier, I got married/civil-partnered in June. Although nothing has changed (we’ve been 14 years together), it was nice to have some friends & family over to celebrate. It was a small ceremony, but we all had a great time. My brother came with his family, and I spent a few fun days with them in London.

In September, we visited Barcelona and we had another celebration there with friends and family, in a Catalan masia. And then my sister visited us in November for my birthday and we saw the early Christmas lights in London & ate lots of delicious Asian food & Japanese desserts. For Xmas, we went to Barcelona again and we had a lovely time there. We usually avoid Xmas, because flights are always very expensive and very crowded, so it was nice to spend Xmas at home after a while.

Time to rewind and list the achievements.

Work

Lots of Generative AI this year. I thought we were doing quite well, but stuff happens… Read summary in here: “8+ years programming for fashion”.

Indie development

I’m still demotivated with game development. I have some games I wanted to build in my backlog, but it feels a bit pointless if no one is going to play them… But I did release some things:

• I released Syllabits for the browser, Windows and Mac. It’s in itch.io. And almost every Friday evening we’ve been playing it at work, in the Practice mode. I’m glad they liked it in my office! 🥹
• In summer I released maintenance updates for all my iOS games. No new features.
• In December I released a new macOS app called Mantis Shrimp. It was listed 5th in the Top Paid macOS Developer Tools this month! Although only briefly. It was something I was making on the side and that I used at work to compare images. I’ve been doing the Genuary challenge with it, and it’s fun. See my #Genuary1 in Instagram.

Blogging

I didn’t write any technical articles in 2023 😓 Well, I did write one article for my company, but it didn’t get the green light, so it will remain unpublished.

In the Spanish geek blog, the only thing interesting is the article about the FFX New Kabuki I mentioned earlier.

Vlogging

This year I decided to spend more time gaming, and I streamed most of my plays on Twitch. I did upload some YouTube videos as well, but I intended to do more technical ones, and I failed to deliver. All my videos are usually in Spanish, but I’ve added some English subtitles on request.

• I did a couple of rants on ChatGPT, and WWDC23 in my “serious” channel: @endavidg.
• I uploaded a couple of solutions to Advent of Code 2022 (but not 2023 yet…) in my channel on Swift programming: @algoDeSwift.
• I did upload lots of videos to @focotaku 🙈 But it was mainly an edit of my play-through of Final Fantasy XIII from 2022. I thought it was good for learning because I was playing it in Japanese and I wrote some language notes in each one of the video descriptions.
• I did upload some other types of videos to @focotaku, like book reviews of Japanese novels, and some other game reviews. But my most viewed video is one a bit off from the “otaku” culture. It’s a summary I did about the BBC documentary on the scandal involving Johnny Kitagawa (it has English subtitles), the deceased top figure in Japanese music industry / male model agency. The video has 850 views --perhaps not much, but quite a record for me. I’m glad it’s been informative. I did 3 videos on the topic and they are all quite visited.

Learning

• More Python & some C++ at work
• I did all the Advent of Code 2023 in Swift, and I did one of the problems in Godot 4 as well, just for the fun of visualizing it: AoC 2023 Day 22 on Instagram.
• I practiced some Metal again to create Mantis Shrimp.

Leisure

I already mentioned several trips in the first section. I wanted to catch up with some JRPG titles, so I did play & cleared these games:

• Nier Replicant — I enjoyed it very much. The soundtrack is amazing. There’s are some concerts in Europe in February, including Barcelona, but I failed to get tickets… 😢
• Nier Automata — amazing as well.
• Final Fantasy XVI — Epic! It was a present from a friend, and then I also got a PS5 as a present! 🤩 I’m actually replaying it because I enjoyed it very much.

I wasn’t planning to read any novels, but I ended up reading 3 novels in Japanese by the same author, Keigo Higashino. My partner has lots of his novels at home and I got curious. I was surprised I could read them relatively easily. When I tried reading novels in Japanese in the past, it has been usually hard. But the difficult novels were SF or JRPG-related, so the vocabulary may have been weird… I actually read another novel in Japanese, “Egoist”, an LGBT story 🏳️‍🌈, and started another one about NieR, so it’s my record on Japanese novels reading so far! I also read a novel in English called “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”, about game development. It was really moving. See my list of readings.

Wishes for 2024

Again, let’s hope 2024 brings peace ☮️🕊

I haven’t written down my personal goals yet, but I hope I can write some technical blog posts this year. I have one planned about Metal and Mesh shaders, related to the development of Mantis Shrimp.

I also want to upload some videos about Swift development.

I started the year by joining a badminton group 🏸, so hopefully I do more exercise this year!

And I hope to visit Japan again some time this year.

Best wishes to everyone. My dragon-themed new year greetings card at the top of this article (I was also lagging behind on my new year greetings… I started drawing them already in January…)

Again, Happy New Year 2024 🐲

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