It was a bit better than the previous year if I trust my memory.
The year started with me setting up this personal site - where I wanted to share my thoughts publicly, wanted to make my home on internet. Anybody who know or do not know me can come to know me better . I managed to write 10 blogs in 2024, which was one of my new year resolutions. This year I will be improving my home on internet and try to write at least write 20 blogs. Should I commit to writing one blog each week?
Projects
In January I began working on a project, I worked on it for 2 months before shutting it down. The idea was to build a “space repetition based practice app for Maths exercises”. There are some solution but they are paid and closed source. I wanted to build sometime open and community driven. I still do not clearly know why I quit on it.
After this I began working on another project called Dredge. Which I completed on 18 August, the first version. There were still a lot of things to add and remove, hence the project took most of the time this year. Even today the project is not complete, It has changed a lot. I am stuck on performance issue, need to optimize a lot. Can’t say about its future.
Hiking
I began to hike this year - It’s just a fancy way of saying taking walk in evening for me. I have been in my home all my life, rarely went outside, I live in a village in India and almost everyone knows everyone, but nobody know me and I know nobody. sometimes people assume I am from some other place. Just to prove this, there is an orchard of mangoes, just behind my house and I was unaware of that. When me and my friend discovered that, we were so happy, couldn’t stop laughing and mesmerizing the view, the trees, the sun, everything.
I used to have hard time remembering the path to some place even if I had gone with somebody like 100 times. But going alone or going with a friend who himself does not know anything made me rely on myself and my brain stayed active noticing landmark here and there.
What helped me is; how can I explain it? OK! Let’s say you need to go from point A to point B, it is necessary to know the direction of B from A and vice versa. Knowing this I know I am not going in the wrong direction. If I took a wrong turn, still I might find some other path leading to point B.
The problem I encountered, I remember how to go from A to B, but I gets confused when coming back from B to A. Remembering the landmark is helpful here.
Video Games
The year introduced me to the world of video games. Games like a short hike, RDR2, The Forest, Elden Ring and Sekiro came to take place in my memories. Yeah I completed Sekiro - world’s hardest game although I had to follow walk-through because I am a noob.
Playing video games I realized like books, movies it tells stories. When I played ‘A short hike’, I lived a story, experienced a journey, had some beautiful conversations along the way. Someone taught me to fly, someone taught me to fish, a coach taught me to climb. It was amazing how everything was related in there. I wanted it to be longer than 3 hours, I will come back to it again after forgetting a bit so that I can once again enjoy it.
Drawing
I tried to form a habit of drawing recently. I hope it will strengthen by the next year. Just after waking up, I draw for 30 minutes, then take the bath to work on my primary project.
Back in 2022, I left drawing to put all my focus on programming. Guess what, I can’t live without it, I had drawn on an off after 2022 but never had any consistency. I wanted to make the habit of drawing for 30 minutes after work but procrastination was the enemy. I understood if I want it absolutely I need to prioritize it, so began doing it first thing in the morning.
As of now focus is improving my shading and portraits. All my life I had ignored shading in drawing. Instead focused on perspective.