I've been meaning to write this for a while now but (as with many things) I have been procrastinating.
It's finally the day of so I can't really delay much longer. Expect this post to be windy and nonsensical, it is quite late (~23:30) as I write this.
The past year has been quite the crazy one. I graduated from high school and had my first quarter of college. I've gone from living with my family to living alone in a dorm room. I've gone from being a child to being an adult (legally).
Throughout all of these changes one thing I find quite constant is the unbelievable human endurance. People, despite what you may see or think, are able to navigate the turbulence of life quite well. Over the past year, I have accomplished a few things other than the above that I would like to share.
I have started to lean into open source more than I have ever had in the past. It is very easy to see the bad parts of the internet, but one thing that it has allowed without a doubt is the sharing of information. Surprisingly, it hasn't all been advertisements and scams. The concept of "open source" is the shining example of this. Oxford defines it as follows:
Denoting software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified.
In the past, especially in the tech sector, the majority of companies were pushing for more and larger proprietary software. It's incredible that today, outside of a few exceptions (I'm looking at you, Nvidia and Adobe), almost every major tech company dedicates some amount of time and money on software this is free to use. Even Apple, a company famous for their "walled garden" approach to ecosystem building, has started to contribute to major open source projects like llvm.
I wanted to give a quick shoutout to these repositories by big companies. Even if they don't need it, go give them a star:
Cool. I'd also like to quickly shoutout some startups that have been making the waves in open source.
In 2022, I had just under one thousand Github contributions. This can be broken down into a few major categories. These are:
A lot of these have been my own personal projects. I'd like to give a shoutout to:
While I don't have any exact statistics, I've also been contributing to a lot of open source recently. I've been mainly contributing to:
I've also been doing a lot of writing over the past year. While I have recently been doing it less (which is unfortunate), I am working on ~twoish short stories and a poetry collection. I would like to share one of my masterpieces here.
Dryer (10/12/22)
by Lino Le Van
mmm
clothes that come out of the dryer
mmm
warm
mmm
I could go on and on about what I've done. I've participated in hackathons. I made a card game. I've made a form service. But the advancement of time is inevitable and so is this post.
The future is uncertain. This is all that can be known about it. Us silly humans think that we are able to predict it, and I am unfortunately one of those silly humans.
I would also like to make some wild claims just in case any of them are true.
That's about all I have for this post. Before I go, I would like to make some public aspirations known so I may look back on this in next year's post and laugh. Here goes nothing:
I hope that 2023 will be exponentially better for you all than 2022 was. Have a great year!
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