2023 has been a meaty year. In 2022 and the years just prior, I was planting several seeds. A few creative projects here and there, starting a new career, and making the move to Dallas. With 2023, much of the new is now integrating into my day to day life. A garden is growing!

From that garden, here were some of the fruits:

A Year of Working With the Garage Door Open

I time capsuled an intention at the start of 2023. In January, I wrote:

When I was a teenager leaving for college, I very ceremoniously made a promise to myself: Whatever I do, I want to be making things everyday.

I was inspired by internet pop culture, largely webcomics, artists, musicians, developers, bloggers, and skit comedy on Youtube.

Because of that, I had a dream as a kid. A weird dream - but my dream was to have a website. A home on the internet where I could create through all the mediums I loved - writing, music, art, even code!

Since I have this dot com laying around, my aim for this year is to use it! I plan to work with the garage door open. Sharing what I'm learning, what I'm exploring in drawing and music, what I'm reading, and what I'm learning through my work in software.

I can happily say: mission accomplished! Counting it all up, 205 posts made it on the blog this year. Not quite 365 days, but not bad. :)

But the volume isn't really the point. The joy is in the making. And it's been a thrill to be lit up to make so much this year!

So, while I'm not hitting a fully-algorithm-satiating level of daily output, I'm pretty ok with what's making it up here! Next year, I'm even planning to scale back. Making things everyday, but sharing when I'm ready. I want to fully honor the creative cycle, leaving in space for resting between projects.

Art

I drew! A LOT! in September of 2022 I committed to drawing and learning some technique. This year I stuck with it, finding time everyday to sketch.

In 2022, it was life changing to be making music regularly - having a new voice to express through. I realized that you don't have to have "The Gift" to compose, you just do it!

Same is true for art, and it's been equally life changing!

With music, I've always been learning to listen, but composing and improvising taught me to listen to intuition. The same thing has happened through drawing. I've been really intentional about making time to just doodle everyday. Not worrying about the end result, I just wanted to have an idea and get it out the page. Being able to do that with drawing is a game changer – to see an image and then at least have a rough idea of it on the page is like nothing else!

I have to say, music writing is fantastic because it expresses what otherwise is really difficult to express. It's almost other worldly. Art is thrilling, because it can capture things that do exist, or things that could exist - in a vocabulary that's part of the daily vernacular: shapes and color.

Once you know the building blocks - anatomy, spheres, boxes, cylinders - and you can build with that... the real fun comes with drawing something that isn't in front of you. True invention!

Even when drawing from reference, especially drawing people, there's something so satisfying about capturing life, just from moving the pencil across the page...

So, yeah, I kind of love drawing now. You can see what I've been making on my blog and read about a few more lessons learned from drawing.

Music

Picking up art, I had this worry that I wouldn't have any juice left for writing music. I'm thankful that the opposite has been true!

I wanted to up the ante by recording acoustic instruments more than I did in 2022. And I managed to for Cinnamon, Spring, Sketches and Meditations! I have fun with pure music production projects like Forest, Whiteout, Floating, Ice. But, having spent a couple of decades on an acoustic instrument, I have a soft spot for making the music with my own hands!

This year, I played lots of piano, got a classical guitar, listened to a wide variety of music (according to Spotify, mainly chill breakcore, math rock, and J-Ambient.)

I love my new nylon string guitar, I spend a lot of time simply improvising melodies on it. Learned finger style, played some classical, and spent a lot of the year demystifying the neck of the guitar.

I may be crazy for thinking this, but I'm really interested in learning jazz piano before spending more time on jazz sax. So I spent some time reading a few standards and some simple blues improv.

A fun year for music, all in all! Looking to do more jazz in 2024!

Tech

My second full year in software! I've learned tons on the job and am absolutely proud to work with the team I'm on. No better place to be learning and making alongside really smart and driven folks!

This year, I had the intent of really exploring in my spare coding time. By the start of the year, I was really comfortable with JavaScript development. I wanted to further "fatten the T," as it were. Explore new languages, investigate automated testing, and get familiar with cloud architecture. A tall order!!

I started the year with testing, first understanding the philosophy of TDD, taking a look at what a comprehensive testing environment looks line in an application, and then getting my hands dirty with a few libraries. All of those articles can be found through the testing tag

From there, I was itching to learn a new language. One of my previous projects was with a .NET open source application, and I was curious to see how an ecosystem designed for enterprise functioned. So, on to C##! I learned a great deal about Object Oriented Programming through the process, dabbled with the ASP.NET framework, and deployed to Azure. You can read more through the CSharp tag on my blog

As if one language wasn't enough, I dabbled a bit in Go towards the end of the year. Now having an understanding of a server backend language, I was curious to see what a cloud-centric scripting language looked like. So I did a bit of rudimentary exploring for fun. Take a look at the Go tag for more.

Honorary mention to spending time learning SQL! More through the SQL tag

We'll see where the next year goes. After having gone broad, I'm ready to go deep. While I know Python, I'm interested in getting a few more heavy projects under my belt with it as well as further familiarizing myself with AWS.

Reading

I spent time making reading just for fun again! In that spirit, 2023 became the year of comics for me. I still read plenty of art, music, and non fiction books this year. You can see what my favorites were on my wrap up post.

Life

Dallas is great! Seeing plenty of fam, Miranda's making it through school, and I'm playing DnD on the regs with A+ folks. Can't ask for much more!

2024

My sincere hope for next year is to be open to what comes next. I like what's cooking and I'd love to see more, but the real thrill of this year was in exploring so many interests. We'll see! Happy New Year!