2023 Overview and plans for 2024

2023 was a very intense year for me. Getting used to the new life in a foreign country and adjusting to a new job was the main theme of my life.

I have worked hard on my longest-running side project, insightof.me. We initially started development of insightof.me in November 2018 and released the first version on January 1, 2020. After a couple of updates and improvements, it became clear that we needed to enhance the user interface and experience. Hence, we started working on a significant improvement, which would be version 2.0 for insightof.me. However, we faced many difficulties during the development of the new version, and we didn’t set the scope well in the first place. Therefore, the new version has been delayed many times. Despite all the difficulties, by the end of 2023, I can see a release for the first time in 3 years of new version development. With this version, we will achieve what we have in our minds, and insightof.me will be a complete product. It has been an incomplete story for 5 years.

On November 25th at 21:36, the last commit to deliver a missing feature is pushed to beta; on December 24th, it is released to production and is available at https://insightof.me.

I believe it is important to have new year resolutions; however, I feel desperate if I fail to achieve them. In 2024, I want to focus more on my professional career, planning to get an AWS Solutions Architect certificate and extend my skill set by developing with more system programming languages, such as Rust and Go.

I plan to start a new project after the global release of insightof.me, which will be a technical challenge and much more complicated than insightof.me. But before that, I will try something different, such as video game development.

Thank you, Umut.