Highs
2023 was a hectic year, to say the least. The biggest achievement was finally moving home in April after having multiple buyers pull out at the last minute. In the end, we opted for a part exchange on a new build which meant we didn’t have to worry about estate agent fees and took away a lot of stress that we had been experiencing up to that point. We’ve been in the house almost a year now and there’s still plenty to do, but we’re much happier in the new spot.
I’m a massive fan of football - watching and playing . As a season ticket holder at Plymouth Argyle for around 20 years I was delighted to see my team get promoted as champions of League One and now competing in the Championship - one step away from the Premier League. I’ve seen the club there before, but to achieve this only a few years after nearly going out of existence only 12 years prior was particularly satisfying. Getting to celebrate this with my dad and young daughter are memories I’ll cherish for a long time.
Lows
It was a year marked by hospital appointments (this year looks no different, but I’ll save that for 2024’s review blog). In June I was on the receiving end of a rough challenge playing 7-a-side football. I felt a lot of pain in my shoulder, but having suffered shoulder dislocations in the past I thought I’d just done that again.
Still, the pain wasn’t going away, so later that evening I headed up to A&E. Six hours later I got the X-ray results which confirmed I’d broken my collarbone. Pretty badly too.
I was put in a sling, given painkillers and told to see the fracture clinic in a week. A week passed and I headed to the fracture clinic who took another X-ray - it was just as bad. So they asked if I wanted to have an operation to put a plate in. Given that it was it was impossible for me to work, to which I said “Yes”.
Work
In spite of the injuries and time off, work ticked along nicely. I helped to deliver a transport data hub which took up most of my time this year. I learned plenty about Databricks, data analytics, enterprise networking and other fun stuff. I also did a bit of routine maintenance, “keeping the lights on” as it were, for a few other services that tick along in the background.
I’m recently started working on a new project with one of our biggest clients, which is going well so far. I’m getting to branch out of my comfort zone of Terraform into CDK, work with some really interesting datasets. There’s also more of a focus on coaching and mentoring which are skills I’m keen to improve on.
Side Projects
In my 2022 review I mentioned that I struggled to spend time on side projects. I improved on this slightly this year, although I don’t have much to show for it yet. I started working on a new game and shelved the sci-fi 2D platformer I’d been working on for a while. The new game is a Peggle-like and much less ambitious than the platformer, so I’m hopeful I’ll get it finished this year and playable in some form.
After Unity shot themselves in the foot in September by changing their business model, I switched over to GameMaker Studio for game development. I don’t love it - I find the user interface pretty unintuitive - but it’s better suited for the kinds of small projects I want to do.
I started dabbling in football data analytics. It’s an area I’ve a growing interest in, spurred on by my slightly unhealthy obsession with fantasy football. I got my hands on some Statsbomb event data and wrote a number of Python scripts to produce a match report made up of passing networks, shotmaps, duel maps and other fun visualisations.
I mainly used mplsoccer for this, a library which includes pandas and matplotlib among others, and makes it easy to plot football data on customisable charts and pitches. It was a really enjoyable and informative process which further stoked my interest in the area. Look out for a future blog on this here when I’ve had a chance to clean up the code and make the repo public.
Favourite releases
Here’s my list of favourite media to come out in 2023.
Albums
- Anohni - My Back was a Bridge For You To Cross
- Lil Yachty - Let’s Start Here
- JPEGMAFIA and Danny Brown - SCARING THE HOES
- Sufjan Stevens - Javelin
- boygenius - The Record
- James Blake - Playing Robots into Heaven
- Lankum - False Lankum
- Caroline Palochek - Desire, I Want to Turn into You
- Mitski – The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We
- Sampha - Lahai
Movies
- Killers of the Flower Moon
- Spider-man: Across the Spider-Verse
- Oppenheimer
- Anatomy of a Fall
- Mission Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One
- Blackberry
- The Creator
- The Killer
- Tar
- Talk to Me
Games
- Talos Principle 2
- Alan Wake 2
- Spider-Man 2
- Metroid Prime Remastered
- Star Wars: Jedi Survivor
- Storyteller (Android)
TV shows
- Succession
- Barry
- I Think You Should Leave
- Beef
- The Last of Us
- The Bear
- Gen V
- Invincible
- The Fall of the House of Usher
- Only Murders in the Building