Reflections on 2017
Dec 24, 2017On reading
I managed to complete my 2017 Reading Challenge and read 12 books this year. This was an improvement from last year, when I read only 5.
To be quite frankly, I strategically picked a few small books so I could finish the challenge on time. I believe this is OK, but I would rather measure my reading habit by days I actually read something. Since it would be more difficult to track this approach, I am OK with the number of books for now.
Also, 2017 was the year that I got interested in fiction books. Non-fiction books are great to get new insights, but there is nothing more enjoyable that reading a good story in the early morning over a cup of coffee.
On writing software
On the software engineeting side, I broke some new grounds in 2017.
I learned a little bit of Rust in the beginning of the year.
I read the first edition of The Rust Programming Language book and after a few days I manged to overcome the borrow checker and compile some small programs. Following that, I implemented a simple Pomodor timer that I called prod. The highlight of the journey, though, was my implementation of the uniq command for the Redox OS.
I also got a bit more experience in Go. I developed a prototype for an NTP server called ohrad. Also, I implemented a simple HTTTP daemon in my job. The highlight was buildah PR. This one was very rewarding for me, specially because buildah is part of the Atomic Project.
The ugly duckling was C. In the hope to get more experience in this language I started a simple in-memory cache that I called hashd. I never really finished it, but I did learned a few new things on the way.
On changing jobs
2017 was the year that I left Scrapinghub and joined Red Hat.
I left Scrapinghub after 3 years I can’t even describe how much I evolved there. I was very happy to be joining Red Hat, but at the same time I was very sad to leave Scrapinghub.
The process of getting my Czech Visa approved took around 6 months, but fortunatelly everything worked out well.
On writing
In 2017 I wrote many journal entries, but I failed to make it a habit. I found it a tedius task, but I confedd it’s pretty rewarding to read something I wrote a long time ago. It’s impressive to see how much I evolved and, at the same time, how I struggle with some recurring issues.
When it comes to blogging, I completely failed in 2017. I put down some random notes from different topics that later would become blog posts, but they never really reached to their final destination.
On playing the guitar
I started to play the guitar but I had to leave it in Brazil. I made some progress and managed to play a few simple musics and fingerstyles. Nothing that someone would enjoy listening to, though.
On lifting
I was deadlifting 140 kilos and squatting 136 kilos (not counting the bar) right before moving to Czech Republic. I had to stop lifting for a while until I settled down in Czech Republic, and my weights went down considerably. Hopefully I will get back to those numbers in 2018!
On traveling
The only long travel of 2017 happened when I moved from Brazil to Czech Republic. However, living in the middle of Europe brings great advantages! In 2017 I managed to visit 4 countries for the first time: Czech Republic, Germany, Austria and Hungary.