Plans for 2024

Projects · 
13 mins read

A review of my achievements of 2023 and my plans for the coming year.

Another year has already passed, and it’s time to do a recap of what goals have I achieved this year.

In this review, I won’t strictly follow my last year’s list of achievements, to make reading this post a little easier and quicker.

If you are curious about what I’ve done specifically regarding the last year’s list, here it is:

2023 achievements list The list of my achievements for 2023. The ones I actually completed are checked.

Anyway, I already know that I shouldn’t tell people about my goals, but I’m working on reducing my intention-behavior gap year by year and these posts help me check whether there has been an improvement in that or not.

Let’s jump right in!

toc Table of contents

check_circle_outline The successes

Game development

Like with last year’s review post, I want to start with something that has to do with school.

Last school year (2022/2023) I had the opportunity to work with Unity on an extracurricular course about game development. I’m very grateful to my school for giving us students this learning opportunity in such a field, considering how much this is rare to see in Italian schools.

I worked on a little game in a group with other 3 friends and we had a great time both making the game and deepening our knowledge of Unity.

Then, in the summer, I exploited a lot of my free time to remake a video game I had been working on since about 2019. It is about shapes, music and rhythm (but it’s not Just Shapes and Beats!) but I still can’t talk about the details, unfortunately. I used FMOD for the first time to implement the audio mechanics, learning how to use it in parallel with the Unity engine.

However, the complexity and size of the project were underestimated (what a surprise) and I couldn’t complete the project after a few months. That’s not a problem, because I already knew that completing the game would require another couple of years or so, but I currently don’t know how I would find all that time in the future, and except during the summers, I don’t have much spare time to use. I don’t even know if the game idea I had is worth the time required to make it concrete.

Game development screenshot Game development screenshot, with an FMOD window on the bottom-left corner. The temporary name for the game is “RectaPulse”. I don’t know if I’ll keep it or change it…

Android app development

In the summer I also decided to learn the new Android Jetpack Compose toolkit for building native UI, using the official course as the main reference.

While it’s considered a simple tool, it was hard for me to learn this modern set of tools, also because I’ve never used frameworks like React or Angular that share some similarities (though I always wanted to learn React).

I barely completed the tutorial’s projects and I wasn’t able to work on my app idea, which for this year at least, will remain just in my head. At least I now know the basics of Jetpack Compose!

3D modeling

It’s been two years since I planned to come back to Blender and use it more often, but because of working on other projects that lack that necessity, I rarely opened it.

I did once: I was searching for a nice wallpaper for my PC that didn’t have the subject in a central position like the default one (to avoid the overlap with my desktop icons) in Windows 11, so I made a Win11-like wallpaper using the cloth simulation modifier inside Blender. I made a light and dark version and posted the result on Twitter. Here’s a GIF transitioning from the light version to the dark one:

Windows 11 custom wallpaper Windows 11 custom wallpaper.

Chrome extension

In July, if finished my first Chrome extension. It’s called Tabs/Windows Counter and Stats and it keeps track of the number of tabs and windows opened displaying the data in a chart using Chart.js.

I published the extension on the Chrome Web Store and later worked on another experimental extension for getting statistics from a Spotify playlist, called Spotify Playlist Stats (for this latter extension, it may not work anymore and I don’t plan on developing it anymore).

I made the Tabs/Windows Counter and Stats extension because historically my browser has been keeping open a ton of tabs constantly, and I always wanted to see the various upward and downward trends in the number of tabs open each day. BTW, this year I finally closed all my tabs! (I’m way more excited than any normal person would be 😅).

Chrome Tabs/Windows Counter and Stats extension Chrome Tabs/Windows Counter and Stats extension.

Music Production

Last year I planned on releasing my first album or single, but I didn’t make it.

However, I’m much more close to it than last year. I worked a lot of time on Ableton and learned many tips, techniques and practices, and I’m now working on a song that finally, for the first time, I’m proud of and confident to release when it’s finished. I’m working a lot on it even now in the Christmas holidays, but when school starts again I won’t have time to work on it since the summer of next year, so I don’t really know when I will be able to record it, polish it, finish it and publish it on the major streaming platforms. I’m already excited but first I’ll have to do the hard work :).

Video editing and animation

I’m currently creating a video essay on the use of video games in education, and I planned to release it on YouTube this year, but it’s taking so long to edit and I had to postpone the release to next year. It’s very long and I don’t have enough footage for it. I might need to cut some parts to be able to finish it in a reasonable time.

I used DaVinci Resolve and animated some parts also using its node system. With this in mind, I didn’t actually do the kind of animation that you see, for example, in Kurzgesagt videos or similar ones, but I still animated things on the screen and that’s something I wanted to learn this year.

C/C++ Notes website

On my C/C++ Notes website, where I put explanations on the basics of (mostly) C++, I made some little updates and corrections and added new dedicated sections for conditional, loops and random numbers. I also made a collection of exercises (providing the code solution) that you can try to put the theory into practice.

I can’t say that I finished it, but I made quite some progress. However, I’m not sure if I’ll continue it in the next year. After all, now with AI chatbots you can get almost the same information I put in my notes just as easily as by consulting the website (even more, actually), so it would no longer make much sense to spend time on this project, that was born to simplify learning for beginners.

Other achievements this year

This year I:

cancel The failures

Fortunately, they are not a lot!

headphones Content consumption

Aside from using YouTube a lot, mainly for educational and tech content, this year I also listened to a lot of new music, played some games, read a few books and watched some movies.

Music

I discovered, especially in the last few months, how much I enjoy listening to the Melodic Dubstep genre, with artists like ILLENIUM and Seven Lions. The song I’m currently working on is in this same genre, indeed (and a mix of other ones too).

In general, my favorite artist is still OneRepublic. This year for the first time I went to a concert with a friend of mine to see them in Mantova. It was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life!

According to my Spotify Wrapped, my favorite song was Let’s Hurt Tonight and my favorite genre was “Pop”.

Spotify Wrapped 2023 Spotify Wrapped 2023.

By the way, if you want to listen to the same music I enjoy listening to, this year I also made a public playlist of my favorite songs so that you can use it too. You’ll see there are a ton of different genres and types of music, and I continue adding more to it from time to time.

Books

I read the incredible book “A World Without Work: Technology, Automation and How We Should Respond” by the economist Daniel Susskind. It made me deeply and very critically reflect on the future of humanity, when machines will overcome humans, and is a read I highly recommend. I also read the much shorter novel “The Old Man and the Sea”.

Video games

This year I played the following games for the first time, either on PC or Nintendo Switch:

I still haven’t finished some of them, but they all were great games to play. I also finished Ori and The Will of the Wisps considering it one of the best games I’ve ever played.

Movies

I watched both old and new ones:

event_list Plans for 2024

Ok, it’s now time to write down my achievements list for next year. There are 10 of them and I tried to keep them very down-to-earth this time:

Ultimately, of course, the goal is to be happy, but this is more of a general lifestyle than a “next year commitment.”

That’s all for now.

Happy New Year! 🎇🎆


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