New Year Examination: 2023 January 1, 2024 by ~mmagueta

A foreword

My dearest friend Victor invited me to write one of this after he compiled his. Not shortly after, my other friend, Lemos, also approached me with the same intent. Upon such requests I cannot deny, I also found it to be an useful activity I should adule the habit of doing yearly. With that said, here we go with a list of events that I deem to mark as important when I reflect over the past year, as well as a list of commitments for 2024.

Recapitulation

• I got to travel to beautiful Portugal; a trip that will be forever in my heart as it hopefully enriched my then fading interest into the Lusitanian culture and Portuguese literature;
• I learned a substantial amount about topics being preached by the software community as of recent, such as event sourcing;
• I got to teach multiple subjects to kids at my local parish;
• My work has been exhausting and it revealed one of my practical weakenesses: I lose motivation whenever I do not see a purpose on what I am doing;
• I had hopes to finally learn Latin, but I’ve largely neglected learning another natural language up until now. I could not focus, so I ended up studying a bit of Gothic, Latin, Greek and Hungarian, but none in honest effort;
• I went back into literature, and in that rediscovered the beauty of nourishing the imaginary;
• I arranged some meetings with the most marvelous friends I could have;
• I cultivated a passion for classic and quality menswear ever since my trip to London in February;
• I progressed less with philosophy than what I wish I had otherwise.

Highlights

Here is a section dedicated to some of the most important points I judge to have defined my 2023.

Classic menswear

This easily created a huge impact on me. I had the view that a suit was synonim with boring corporate decadent culture. And while people indeed might associate both, my discovery of the Golden Age of menswear in all its glory, ignited in me the desire to use my appearence to convey respect, seriousness, beauty that so often lacks in a functionalist world; but above all, as a way to escape central banking inducing inflationary consumerism. The very decandece I saw, was a direct consequence of such evil aforementioned, and as such, it is only natural to pursue this.

Event sourcing

I had to learn how to develop an event sourcing system from zero. It was a massive ontological challenge, and while perhaps the results might deserve to be hosted into another article, I should take this as a tremenduous achievement. I do believe its very conception is equivocated, but I am glad I got to incorporate such occurrance into my personal ethos in the most resounding way. I now have ammunition and a non-trivial understanding of its application, consequences and purpose, that is worth gold in name of truth.

Idleness

It might sound modest to claim I judge the past year to have been idle. After all that listing, maybe even false modesty. But in truth, I do believe I could have achieved so much more, and yet I slacked quite a substantial amount of my time. Many factors go to this in my reflections, and despite by resolution, as I have stated in my Virgilian confession, I believe that the soul crushing atmosphere at work, concomitant to a market downturn and at times hedonistic attitude, all inflated my indolence that I am now committed to get rid of with a purposeful seeking of a story based on the sacred.

For the year to come

It is fair that at the end, I should then commit myself to activities that I hope to sincerely achieve by the end of the year. They are:

• Deepen my understanding of investments and financial planning;
• Finally finish renewing my wardrobe with versatile new pieces of quality suits, shirts and shoes;
• Pray more consistently and frequently;
• Become well versed into classical literature;
• Finish the Aristotelian Organon and the Metaphysics;
• Get more invested into Postgres open source;
• See my friends that are far away at least a couple of times over the year;
• Write more about software; and last but not least,
• Improve my oratory substantially.