Already in 2022, but I finally found some time to think about 2021. I only did half of the goals that I set for 2021, but it's not bad.

This year I didn't do as much indie development as in previous years, but I wrote lots of "geeky" blog posts instead. Check the blogging section below.

Achievements

Work

As part of the eTryOn project, I gave a talk in the XR4Fashion workshop (part of ISMAR 2021). Here's the talk: From 3D design to Lens Studio (starts at 1:59, 30-minute talk).

I've also been creating some AR filters using Lens Studio. Some are part of eTryOn (Odlo's Scott MTB), but most are part of Metail's GHOST fellowship. Here's a funny test I made with Lil Nas X: Instagram reel.

Indie development

I haven't worked in any major new game or app this year. I needed a bit of a break. However, I did release a few updates. Release summary:

• In February, I released The Therapy RPG, a game to celebrate my sister's birthday.
• Coloroscope was updated in April, with dark mode support, and new readings.
• In May, they removed Snake on a Sphere from the App Store because of lack of updates, so I had to make an emergency update. I also added a new Hard Mode to the game.
• Complex Feelings was updated in June, with a new NVC flow, to help you track observations and requests.
• Also in June, I updated Sil·labetes and Silabitas, just with a bug fix for newer phones.
• Sopilabitas was updated in July, to help my mum recover her hi-score, because she deleted the game by accident.
• In August I made the first public release of Harmonikr, a macos App to compute Spherical Harmonics and HDR cubemaps. I made this app in 2015, and it was available as a direct download, but because it was useful for something for work, I tidied up and released it in the App Store.

Blogging

I've been a bit lazy with technical articles at work. However, I did write a couple of technical posts in my spare time:

• Image Maps of an arbitrary area, a development article of Sopilabitas.
• iOS eats your data. How to control it. This is something I was investigating while on holidays.
• Advent of code 2021: Postmortem. These are just my impressions after having finished that programming challenge.

I also wrote 3 short stories for the Medium writers challenge:

• 8 light years between us
• In death we forget
• Cicadas and ants

and a small introspective article about anxiety: FOHWT: Fear Of Having Wasted Time.

All of that has been syndicated to Medium @endavid.

This year I've been quite active in my "otaku" blog, a blog in Spanish where I talk mainly about anime and games. I wrote a total of 19 posts. I'll highlight a few articles worth mentioning:

• El declive de Clubhouse. I got into Clubhouse in Spring, and I translated a quite interesting article from Japanese Yahoo News. I'm mostly happy about how the translation turned out. My own impressions are in another post I wrote in July, Lecciones de Clubhouse.
• Marunage 丸投げ - El ancestral arte japonés de pasarse el marrón. I wrote an interesting entry about "Marunage" in the Spanish Wikipedia, and then I blogged about it. "Marunage" is the Japanese equivalent to Buck passing.
• El juego del calamar 🦑 - Referencias. I found quite a few interesting references about Squid Game, explained in this post.
• "Mujer", la culebronización turca de un J-drama 🇯🇵🐍🇹🇷. I found out that a very popular Turkish drama that became a hit last year in Spain, was originally a J-drama. I watched the Japanese series and compared it with the Turkish.
• Violet Evergarden y las chicas robot. Violet Evergarden is a short anime series that's in Netflix. I made an analysis of the personality of the main character and compared it to some similar characters in other anime (Spock-like girls, perhaps in the autistic spectrum).
• Violet Evergarden, Hideo Kojima, "mono no aware" y la crisis de la mediana edad. I'm quite happy with this article. I extensively searched Kojima's twitter timeline, selected interesting tweets, pasted in slides, put them in order, and made a story out of it. I discovered the Japanese concept of "mono no aware", which it's a kind of nostalgia you experience by observing how time passes. Finally I talked about his mid-life crisis.
• Feliz navidad 🎁 Señor Lorenzo ー David Bowie & Ryūichi Sakamoto, ¿BL?. I only learned about "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence" movie last month, and I had to blog about it, because I was shocked and awed to find that David Bowie and Ryuichi Sakamoto starred that movie.

Vlogging

I recorded a few development stories about Syllabits, Sil·labetes, Silabitas, and Sopilabitas. You can find the videos here: David Gavilan Ruiz videos (2 in Spanish, 1 in Catalan, 1 in Japanese, and 1 in English).

Back to "otaku" stuff, I posted also several videos and shorts (a couple about Final Fantasy XV, game I cleared last year, and one where I compare different keyboards and how they perform when typing multiple languages).

Power up

Between work and my spare time indie development, I keep using these 4 programming languages: Python, Swift, C++, and Javascript. I didn't use much Go this year.

I read 3 of the latest Michio Kaku's books this year, about physics and the mind. I also read a Final Fantasy XV novel in Japanese, to practice reading Japanese (see Readings). I've also read several manga in Japanese, like the whole collection of 鬼滅の刃 / Kimetsu no Yaiba / Demon Slayer, and one of the seasons of Uramiya Honpo. But the novel was definitely more challenging than the comic books.

In Clubhouse I mostly join rooms in Japanese, but I also joined other rooms in Portuguese, Italian, and French. And I got a bit better at understanding conversations in those romance languages. Unfortunately, I still can't speak any of those 3... 😅 But I bought a book of French grammar and another of Italian grammar, and I've been studying a little of both.

Power down

I tried picking up piano again, but I gave up quite quickly... 😅

Leisure

I managed to take a 3-week holiday and go to Spain. I was in a small town in the sea-side with my mum for 2 weeks. With no Internet, and going to swim at least 1 Km every morning. So very relaxed and healthy. It's still a bit difficult to travel with the pandemic, but it's a matter of avoiding peak seasons. Similarly, I went to Barcelona in early December, to avoid the Christmas rush. And we even managed to do one short trip to Porto, and another to Madrid, both off-season (October and November).

Unfortunately, I haven't managed to go to Japan this year either... Perhaps in 2022... Depending on what happens with the pandemic and provided that the Japanese government doesn't make things difficult to enter, of course.

After clearing Final Fantasy XV, I played a bit of "La Mulana" on PS Vita, but I got frustrated by the difficulty, and I stopped playing games completely for a while. Only last month I started playing "Bioshock". It's an old game I hadn't played yet. I had no idea of what it was about, so I was quite surprised by its noir themes. It's good. I cleared it last week.

I got subscribed to Apple Music and I found lots of interesting channels. I'm currently hooked to an Attack on Titan playlist, but I can't pick a favorite song from 2021 right now... Let's say One Last Kiss, by Utada Hikaru, from the last movie of Evangelion. Because 2021 is also the year when Evangelion finally ended (I also wrote something about it, Sayonara a todos los EVAs).

Anyway, happy new year to everyone! The year of the tiger 🐯 Here's my new year greetings (年賀状): endavidg (happy 2022).

Let's hope we can go back to normality in 2022 ❤️

Tweet