Some rambly bits about how 2021 has been and possible plans for the year to come.
Hello everyone,
The end of the year has come again, and it's time to draw conclusions on the year that is about to end and put up some new year's resolutions, because why not.
The bad
Let's start with the most annoying bit: what has been unsatisfactory or just outright bad about my experience with this year.
To sum it up: I feel like I've skipped an entire year.
Doing the same things, seeing the same things, hearing the same news all the time: being stuck in some kind of loop feels surreal, and it's thoroughly annoying.
Health: I haven't been feeling the best. I've had some health worries that I thought I fixed just to see them return and put everything I've done to get better in discussion. Considering the world pandemic that we are going through, having health issues shoots the anxiety up into the stratosphere.
Work: no matter how much I tried to juggle things, put myself out there and in general keep myself afloat, work has been a total train wreck. The pandemic and logistical problems have resulted in an extraordinary cut to the earnings, which has brought a good deal of anxiety to my everyday life.
I've tried to keep up with studying on Tuesdays but that has been taken over by the general mess that this work year has been in just a couple of months. My objective was to get better at my job, so I could make better things faster: I'm not satisfied with the results, but to be fair I can't demand miracles from what is effectively 8 days of studying.
I've tried to improve my exposure, with mediocre results at best, which doesn't give me much hope for the future.
The good
I've had a surprisingly good response to the "2D Game Development: From Zero To Hero" project: I was expecting at most 500 downloads by the end of this year. I'm surprised to see the download counter surpassing 2600.
I received some nice comments and reviews, along with a couple suggestions too, which are always welcome.
The book now features 4 editions: Pseudocode, Python, C++ and JavaScript. Both in PDF and EPub (although the EPub version has some issues). All of them are actively maintained, even though (due to burnout) the project is on hold, with some minor tweaks here and there going on behind the scenes.
The future
In 2022 this container of pure, unadulterated randomness will be 10 years old: in this time this blog went through many iterations, from Wordpress to Pelican, starting with default themes and now using a custom one. It has been fun tinkering with it, and in doing so I've made a mess.
While trying to streamline the theme so I could use it for both my blog and business website, I changed the URL structure of this blog (one of the cardinal sins of SEO). One of my objectives in 2022 will be putting up redirects and try to salvage this poor victim of my carelessness.
Another new year's resolution is "bring back cultural Tuesdays": I want to take a day dedicated to studying again, and hopefully see an improvement for real. I want to get better at my job, make less mistakes and just be able to do more, faster.
Another one: I want to invest in my own job. Expanding my network and eventually thinking about either a couple serious certifications or an advertisement campaign. I need to plan it carefully if I want to get out of this bog.
As a bonus, here's one more: I want to invest some more time in just "fixing" and make "2D Game Development: From Zero to Hero" more beginner-friendly, both on the reader's and contributor's side. I also want to convert more bitmaps into SVG images, for that crisp crisp vector graphics goodness.
Even more! (is there a discount on "New year's resolutions" today?) I'm thinking of creating a GitHub organization to manage possible translations of "2D Game Development: From Zero to Hero" in other languages: since the thought was thrown around in the discussion board on Itch.
Last one, but not least: stop trading my health for my job. I noticed that in 2021 my work hours have been all over the place, and I often found myself getting anxious about work either in the middle of the night or in weekends. I want to plan my work hours better and finish working when I decide that work has finished.
No more "working in the back of my mind", no more "bashing my head on a problem until I fix it", and just in general trying to take care of things as they come to me. This will probably be the hardest resolution yet. If I can add some "shed a few pounds" into the mix, that would be awesome.
Conclusions
Lots of bad, but also some good. 2021 was definitely a mixed bag of an year, hopefully this year has been "the year of seeding", and hopefully little sprouts of good will come out in 2022.
Usually I'm one that either wants to cut ties with the old year, or just end up crying due to lack of satisfaction in what I've done (I'm not ashamed to admit it). This year felt like nothing, as in an year that was skipped.
So I guess it's time to say goodbye to 2021: the year that never was (at least in my book).
I really hope you all have a productive, happy and all around amazing 2022.
Stay safe, stay awesome.
Penaz.