Halfway Through 2023
Photo by David Traña on Unsplash
Time flies so fast and we are halfway through 2023, a year that has been both exhilarating and full of unexpected twists and turns. It feels as though just yesterday we were saying goodbye to the previous year, and now we stand at this midpoint, marveling at the rapid pace of life.
Like a roller-coaster ride, my journey has been filled with unforgettable adventures; both fun and challenging moments.
In this article, I'd like to share some of the things that are happening in my life.
Taking a Rest from Training
This year is the most challenging year for my bodybuilding and boxing journey as I need to stop my training for at least a few months due to various injuries.
In February, I had my left wrist injured and I had to tone down my weightlifting sessions and stop my boxing training immediately due to immense pain. I had my right shoulder injured recently, leading me to more painful training sessions. The nail in the coffin is when I decided to undergo dental surgery, making me do a full stop to my training until my surgery wounds get healed.
Though I had to completely stop my routine, I always believe that recovery is as important as training. I'll take my rest for a while and come back stronger and better.
Learning and Relearning
After some time tinkering about my future, I decided to improve more on my technical skills rather than immediately climb the ladder going to a management role. With this decision, I started spending my time learning new things and relearning things that I feel necessary.
Being in the tech industry means that I need to be on the constant lookout for new tools, libraries, and paradigms to avoid stagnating and eventually getting left behind. Not necessarily picking up anything that comes up, but having general knowledge of them gives you a perspective on people's motivation and drive behind a specific piece of tech, creating a comparison against the industry's current standards.
This year, I had a nice pacing in terms of learning. Below are the major tech-related things that I paid attention to:
Amazon Web Services (AWS) - Despite using AWS extensively at my day job, I decided to dive deeper and learn more about it. I made a goal of three certifications this year and I already got two of them and have been doing a slow pace learning for the third one. Apart from steamrolling certifications, I've been getting my hands dirty with different lab exercises to grasp difficult concepts, and ultimately learn different architectures that would benefit me in building solutions for cloud-related problems.
Generative AI - A hot topic of the year. With the recent development in Artificial Intelligence, I had an interest in diving deep into it. I'm currently going through free course offerings from Google to learn more, and hopefully make a good use case for this technology.
React - Don't get me wrong, I've been using React extensively for a few years now, but my main goal is to refresh my mind with its mental models, and relearn the internals of it, basically how it works behind the hood. With the recent launch of react.dev, the process of relearning things have been smooth sailing. With new improvements around React 18, I'm interested in Server Components and other features that will possibly reshape the front-end scene in the future.
Nuxt - I had the chance to watch a 100-second video featuring its capabilities, and I fell in love with it. I had the chance to tinker around Vue.js (which powers the framework) during the days that I've been heavily using Laravel, and though I had no chance to use Vue.js professionally, I enjoyed using it on my personal projects.
Apart from tech-related things, I started rekindling my entrepreneurial side by opening a small perfume business this year. Though I'm considering that I'm doing an okay job with it, I'm studying more about the perfume business, and hopefully scale my business in the future.
For the Rest of the Year
I think that I'm at a good pace right now. I'm still cautious with my health, and trying to better myself each day. I plan to keep my consistency and hopefully end the year in good standing.
Despite the things that I'm doing, one of the goals that I have is to reconnect with people. I've been off social media for a long time, and this year, I'm thinking of going back to fix the bridges that I unintentionally destroyed. I haven't made up my mind as I see more cons than pros of being on social media, but I still think of reconnecting with people, one way or another.
Hope for the best results for the rest of the year!