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It’s the end of 2023, a time to reflect on my accomplishments and envision the future.
Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash
What did I do?
I originally had a portfolio site ran about 4 years. The designs were totally horrible with weird light and dark mode colours. I don’t have the sense of art to make my site beauty. Also CSS is my largest pain point that I never understand its behaviour. Sometimes it works but sometimes not.
In April, I decided to revamp my website and planned to write some posts for it. I just randomly looked at Google and found Astro has static site generator (SSG) and best with SEO. SSG can make the website static without setting up specific language on a server. The things you need are a website server (Apache, Nginx, you name it) and storage. As I said, I am really not good at design and there is a theme library. And yes, I found this theme, AstroPaper by @satnaing. I started to make this site up and planned to write some articles once a month. But I usually feel tired after work and want to spend my time on my game library.
Also I learned NextJS with tRPC. tRPC is a great tool for developers. It provides End-to-End Type-safe feature which prevent breaking other ends functionality when another end introduced breaking changes. When you change a data model, TypeScript will find out the errors if some attributes are missing on the components which utilise. Hope I can have a dedicated article talking about this.
I tried to setup ArchLinux on my PC intermittently but it is too customisable and I still don’t have idea for my rice. While archinstall helps me to bootstrap the system, I still need to spend more time on installing additional packages, including CJK fonts and input methods. I lean on KDE by the way. Ideas and suggestions are welcomed and appreciated.
What am I planning to do?
Surreal DB
Surreal DB has captured my attention with its unique query language called SurrealQL, GraphQL, REST, WebSockets support. Also it can work as a traditional database and a file-based database at the same time.
TypeScript project with a suitable framework
I am still lack of knowledge about it, although I have learnt tRPC. I have a project worked on before I started working. But I think it is a time to revamp it as a challenge next year. Planning to have an admin panel and utilise with Surreal DB.
Arch BTW
Yea. Just install it and use it as a daily driver. Time to move away from Bloated Windows.
Mini Server
Purchasing a small-form factor PC for a home-lab server has become popular these days. My plan is to run multiple services on the server and see if I can run a modded (resource-hog) Minecraft server.
Conclusion
These are my accomplishments and future plans as we wrap up 2023. I look forward to the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.