My Wishlist for 2023

It's been a month since my last post. I didn't intend for it to take so long between posts but December is a busy month when my productivity slows down.

I've been working heavily on Twin. Twin started as a theme for VSCode and Kitty, but with the inspiration from Dracula, Nord and Halcyon I think I want to it to go bigger. The name was chosen because Twin is actually two themes: Blue and Grey. As most themes start, I want something that is tailored for me. Dracula is good, but the foreground color is too close to white. I need something that is more neutral. Nord is fine too, but it's too flat for my tastes. Halcyon is closer too what I want to get and its partly on Ayu which is what I'm using already VSCode. I'm also referencing various design choices from Night Owl.

That's it for my current projects status right now.

2023

Doing New Years resolutions is something that I have made before, but I have never followed through with it. I didn't hold myself accountable. That's the easy way out, sadly. This year I want it to be different.

2022 was a low year for me. When it started I was already reaching burn-out from work and between March and April I had reached my limit. I was being over-worked, my output was very poor and the place I was in was not fulfilling my need. After that, I needed some time to find joy in coding again and it took me quite some time indeed. But right now I'm reaching the point where I NEED to find work fast. This leads into my first wish for 2023.

Find a job

I realize what's going on with the tech industry for a few months. Massive lay-offs have hit big tech companies and, while I don't think I'm too affected by these because of my location and level of experience, I feel like it has made everyone somewhat scared. And also, I have definitely seen people announce that they were laid-off in LinkedIn. (Side note: the spanish word people has been using to sugar-coat it is "desvincular". This roughly translates to "unbind". I hate the euphemism in this case. If it had been me, I would just be frank and direct and say "fired".)

Ideally, I would want to keep working remotely and the stack would be in JavaScript and/or Ruby. My previous job was React with PHP/Laravel and the latter I would like to avoid if possible. I can do it but PHP is not a language that gets me excited. I would sooner learn another language.

Learn a new programming language

This one is easy. I've stuck with Ruby and JS for a long time now, and I consider myself fluent enough in PHP to use in a professional setting. Admittedly, I'm a little rusty in Ruby right now but I'm going to start using it more soon.

The new language could be Python or Rust as strong candidates. Go and Kotlin are in the maybe category but less likely. Lately I've been learning a lot about shell scripting, particularly Fish, and I obviously would like to get better at it.

Contribute to open source

This is something I should've done much sooner. Things I use a lot and that I could get familiar with to contribute are Pug, VSCode, VueJS and Kitty. Ideally I would contribute to one of those in some aspect, but we will see.

Launch Twin Theme

Now, for the easiest one in the list.

As I said before, Twin started as simply a theme for VSCode and Kitty. But I'm starting to get interested enough with it that I could port it to several other tools. These include Alacritty, Slack, Firefox, Sublime Text and other tools which I use in passing or that are simple to port.

I truly believe that I have a pair of good color schemes and I hope people like and contribute.

Website redesign/evolution

This is the obvious one. In its current state, this site is not very appealing to look at.

To 2023

Somehow I can't shake the feeling that this lis is too short or not ambitious enough. But I'm going to stop right now so I can publish this before 2022 ends. I might revisit this during 2023 and will definitely do progress updates.