Random musings of a human.

Reflecting at 2023...

The year has come to an end, it’s December 31st, 2023 and I’m drafting this post, by the time this will be posted, it might be 2024!

This year has been particularly interesting for me, I’ve experienced extremes of ups and downs both personally and professionally. One thing that was constant over the year was, the variety of emotions felt each month.

“My mom always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get.”

  • Forrest Gump

Here are some of the wins of 2023:

  1. Experimented heavily on OpenAI: ChatGPT and OpenAI were the spotlight of the whole year 2023. The start of the year was with GPT-3.5, later on, GPT-4, and finally the whole ordeal with firing the founder/s. I won’t go into the details here as just a quick search on the internet yields tons of articles and posts. Luckily, I got to experiment a lot on OpenAI, building models, and training models for my day job. I experimented with custom GPT, Assistants API, and creating fine-tuned models that could generate acceptable results based on prompts. Having the opportunity to work on a product with a focus on Generative AI, I got to be in the driver's seat to experiment with this. Will definitely write about this in upcoming blogs.

  2. Healthy Diet: Since, February, I started a diet to decrease my Body Mass Index(BMI)”) as I was in the overweight zone, and I had planned to get into the normal index by 6 months. Luckily, thanks to proper diet, exercise, and discipline, I was able to reach my goal in 2.5 months. I have been sustaining it and I’m planning to continue that in 2024.

  3. Learned to drive: Although I did know how to drive a car, I couldn’t drive on the road in Kathmandu. Driving in Kathmandu is extremely tough as there are lots of bikes covering the road, there aren’t many working traffic lights and we have to depend on traffic police for signals additionally, there’s too much public transport.

  4. New Language: At the end of 2023, I started to follow my interest and learn how to design compilers and language. I’m currently, working on a language that is (trying to be) syntactically similar to a well-known language and will have some extra language features than that and will compile to an executable than the VM which the inspiration language depends on. This is by no means a new idea and there are a ton of languages like that but, I wanted to try my hand at this and also learn about the Algorithms involved while creating effective hash-maps, GC, etc. What’s wrong with n+1 language? :–)

  5. Books and Music: This year I read, 24 books ranging from Technical books and non-fiction to Novels and other fictional books. This is I believe quite low from the previous year, I will have to pick this up in 2024. The plan is to read at least 3 mid-size books a month. On music, I did make quite good progress as I listened to 240 new albums I hadn’t heard before and from 115 new artists.

  6. Learned to Draw: In the last quarter of this year, I enrolled in a course on Udemy on Drawing. So far, I’m enjoying it a lot and will share some of my drawings in upcoming blogs.

  7. Limiting social media: I never had an Instagram account till 2020, and didn’t have a Facebook account from 2017-2020, and was pretty much non-existent on Twitter till 2019. But, during covid phase, I started using social media as it was the only way to connect with people and I went back to checking social media every hour or so since then. Thankfully, during mid-2023, I decided that enough was enough and have limited my usage as I have deleted my account on some platforms and I only use other media only an hour a day. The only thing I have tried unsuccessfully to limit is YouTube. Maybe this is a challenge for 2024.

  8. Completed Games: I’m an avid gamer and I keep on getting new games when interesting ones come out or go on sale but, am not able to finish it properly due to which my games backlog grew to 150 in the last quarter of 2023. Out of which, I completed 15. So, there are still 135 games to be played (if I don’t get something new).

These are some of the wins of 2023, yes, there are plenty of losses too, but, the idea is to focus on the positives and build upon them. Hoping the list for 2024 grows into a massive list with too many wins.

Also, one challenge for me in 2024 is to blog every week. I did get a long subscription for write.as, as I believe this a great blogging platform and I do want to get into a habit of writing long posts each week.

Happy New Year, 2024!


(Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson. Retrieved from: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1995/12/31)