I am very late with this report, but I don’t think many people were waiting for it, so never mind. Anyway I take the opportunity with this 2024 closing report to also do a kind of recap of how the year went. So, the structure of this report will be different from the past ones since I won’t give any title or subtitles.
I think 2024 was overall a good year for me, especially from mid-year onwards and I’ll dedicate a paragraph for each important thing happened.
First, I was lucky to meet a new colleague at work, who got me involved in a new project and I finally was able to see and understand what Software Engineering is. He is really awesome programmer who has written in the first half of 2024 the codebase that I worked on in all these months. In all this, luck was to immediately see what a Clean Code was, how to structure properly a Python project, how to write classes and how to extend them properly, what are composition and inheritance, some design patterns, and much more.
Next, I collected a lot of notes on this blog, especially about Python and Apache Spark. I also published some notes about Apache Spark on LinkedIn, which forced me to write them in the best possible way. I’m very happy to have dedicated a lot of my free time to write and learn because I’m sure all these stuff will be useful to me even in the future. It’s such a satisfactory feeling understanding how many things, that I have always used automatically without any questions, work under the hood.
If it’s true that I spent a lot of time learning and writing, it’s also true that I waste a lot of time in useless activities. This makes me sick to my stomach at the very thought: how much time we spend daily scrolling on these fucking social media. Sometimes I think that unsubscribing is the only way to go, but at the end of the day I have always avoided to do take these drastic actions saying that “Ok, I’ll dedicate on scrolling less time”. And maybe it’s true, I really dedicate less time on that, I uninstalled all social media from the smartphone, but I used the laptop a lot. And the problem is that “scrolling time” is still a lot. I have never quantified time, but I’m sure is still a lot.
Another thing I want to remember is the concept of “Shortification of learning” (which I have already mentioned in this post) expressed by Andrej Karpathy. I really think that the absence of textbooks and longform documents is one of the failures of recent times. That’s also the reason why a lot of material of this blog is extracted by physical book I bought in the last months. My purpose is to avoid shortform documents, short video, and other shortcuts to learn something that actually needs effort.
That’s all. Hoping to do better in this new year.