New year 2024: Beginning

Welcome to Abstract Symphony, fellow humans.

First off, a very happy new year. May you find love, happiness and joy this year.

Wedding

2023, for me, was life changing. In a good way. I got married to my beautiful wife, spent more time with family (thanks to my new job at Oliv), read a lot of books and healed from wounds of the past. I can not be grateful enough for this phase of my life.

The wedding brought my family closer. It was tiring to the core to the whole family, but enjoyable nonetheless. I usually stay away from the crowd and excess stimuli but bent these boundaries for the family, and it turned out fine. Like all the things in nature, the excitement and joy came back to the normal level. Now, there are photos and videos of these moments, that we will cherish for the next several years.

New Job at Oliv

I have an itch of experimenting and reading about new things, specifically in the technology industry. For the last couple of years, I wanted to read and learn about clojure - a dynamic, functional and lisp flavoured programming language. The idea of REPLs fascinated me from the very first moment I read about them. So, I went ahead and tried to build a project with it. I failed miserably, it was hard to alter my thinking to align with the principles that clojure stood for.

Later when dvd contacted me about joining Oliv in the mid 2023, I couldn't say no. One of the reasons was clojure based tech stack at Oliv.

I hopped on the clojure journey and haven't looked back. I've come to love clojure due to following reasons:

• REPL driven development
• Relatively small and growth driven community
• Open source orientation
• Down to earth moderators and builders

There are probably more, that I don't recall right now. Join the Official Clojurians Slack if you're interested.

Books

Reading, as a habit, began when I faced an identity crisis during my undergraduate studies. I was looking to improve myself, probably due to self-esteem issues. Since then, I have been continuously reading psychology, philosophy and self-help non-fiction. At a point of time, I was only reading the books and nothing else.

2023 was a moderate reading year. I bought 20+ books, finished 1 and still reading 4-5 books at a time. It's become a hobby more than anything else now. Reading is a stress releaver.

Following is a list of books I read in 2023.

• Courage to be disliked: A paradigm shift is rare, and this book did it in a way that hit close to home. It has a dialog based writing style and I could see myself in one of the two main characters. A beginner friendly introduction to Adlerian Psychology, that promotes the idea that all the problems we face are interpersonal relationship problems. We can solve these problems by helping others and seeing them as our comrades.
• The beginning of infinity: In my teenage and college years, I was fascinated, as well as, troubled by the fundamental questions about universe, our existence and the lack of their answers. This book doesn't answer these questions but adds more perspectives for us to think about them. Loved every chapter of it.
• Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement: This book gives an idea about how to prioritise our work and what goals should we strive for in it.
• Designing data intensive application: Well, what can I say except "read this instead of taking those system design preparation courses". An enjoyable read about how large systems work and their most fundamental pieces.
• Atomic Habits: Science and psychology based habit building. James Clear, the author, makes it an enjoyable read by adding short stories about small algorithms we can implement to build good and destroy bad habits.

It is not an exhaustive list of books I read in 2023. The above is the ones that I found most interesting and would recommend everyone to read.

Writing

I came across a few people in last few years that have inspired me to write. Writing also helps me arrange and sharpen my thoughts. Having a brain that is susceptible to distraction poses a different set of problems to the quality of conversations and thoughts.

I wanted to start writing but before that I needed to build a blogging platform with a great design and implementation in clojure. Unfortunately, I always procrastinated as it was no simple task.

Late in 2023, I was going through the mighty borkdude's socials and found the quickblog, a light-weight static blog engine for Clojure and babashka. I was writing my first blog within a minute. Super grateful for this product. Thanks Michiel.

Goals for 2024

I am not one of those people who choose new year resolutions at the beginning of the year and as it passes, forgets about them.

On a high level, I want to work on my family and help them reach a place where they could focus on what's important (Story about this sometime later). Focus on my marriage and get the fundamentals right in terms of our plans and family. I would also like to improve and be cosistent in writing on this blog and reading the books that I couldn't finish in 2023.

These are the most important ones and I look forward to and wish you all have, a great new year.

Quote for the post

God give me serenity to accepts things I can not change, the courage to change that I can and wisdom to know the difference.

Published: 2024-01-01

Tagged: life-update