31 December 2023
The end of the year is here. 2023 was one of the best years of my life, full of achievements and beautiful moments.
I will go in chronological order. At the start of 2023, I went, as part of my FTC robotics team Peppers, to Bucharest to compete in the Regional Phase of the FTC Romania Championship. Peppers had won first place, and with the Innovation Award, we were qualified for the National phase. A month later, I went again to Bucharest for the National phase where Peppers won the Inspire Award and we were qualified for the FTC World Championship, in Houston! This was an absolutely surreal experience, I had no expectations of this. Some time later I went to Bucharest again, this time to get my US Visa. In April I went to Houston, Texas, with my robotics team. We did well at the Championship, however the memories outgrew the award.
Once I returned from the USA, I started to work on Helix. This is one of my most complex projects and I am very proud of it, as it’s based on the need of solving an issue I am deeply passionate about: CS education. I competed with Helix in the Olympiad for Innovation and Digital Creation (Infoeducatie), where I got first place in the county phase, in May. In June I went to Focsani to compete in the National phase. At Infoeducatie, qualified projects are assigned a score, and a ranking is created. The ranking is hidden at first and only the first 5 are selected to compete in a 24h hackathon. I also qualified for the hackathon, where I won the first place, by quite a big margin! I can’t express how greatful I am for this! I met awesome people from the Romanian CS community.
After this, I returned home in early August. About half of the year and I already had earned an international award and scored on the first place at a national olympiad. Thanks to my experience working on Helix, in november I started my first internship at an IT company with offices in my town. It’s another great experience, and I am very thankful! I’m learning so much by working on real world software.
Let’s go with “Year of learning”! With some notable subthemes such as “Year of systems level programming” and “Year of practice”.
I feel like 2023 had too much “soy dev” stuff, like web development with bloated JavaScript modules. My programming love is, at the moment, C++ and I want to pursue more C++ projects. I want to get better at C++, learn more of the standard library, and learn more good practices and programming techniques. Even if high level projects like websites and apps might be fun, I want to focus on what I want to do for the rest of my life. Do I want to build flashy web apps, field with ads and subscriptions? No, I want to have a meaningful addition to this world, I’m not fully decided yet, but be it deep learning, physics research, spaceships, medicine, or whatever field I will choose later in life. Regardless of the specific field, I want to do low level programming, fast, highly optimized code. I’m taking into consideration deep learning, finance, robotics, medicine and more. That’s why I want to focus on my skills from now and get better at the foundation, so I can build on top of it later in life.
I also can’t leave out web development, since it’s also an important branch of CS with a lot of opportunities, which is also very catchy and easy to showcase. My weapon of choice for web dev in 2024 will be Golang. I feel like Go strikes a good balance between the beauty of C and the syntax and ease of package management of Python. I’m not a fan of Rust anymore, mainly because of its very slow compile times.
Besides programming, I also want to learn more physics. In the goals section, I describe how everything ties in.
Let’s start with some quantifiable goals:
Now onto learning goals:
I’m thinking I should focus and learn stuff I actually want to work in my life. I don’t want to work on boring projects, that exist simply as money-maker machine for some company. That’s why I don’t want to focus on stuff like Java, C# or PHP. I’m manifesting for the universe to give me nice challanges :) That’s why I decided to focus on these languages: C++, Go, C and Python.
I think I already have a good foundation. I want to extend this foundation and make it stronger.
2023 was an awesome year I won’t easily forget. First of all, I wish for health in 2024, for me and my family. I hope to become a better programmer and person in 2024, with a stronger foundation I can build a Tower of Babel upon! I still have 2 more years of high school and I want to make them count. Happy New Year!