One year retired

I have been retired for one year now, and what happened? Well...

  • I basically stopped coding and reading about anything computer-related for eight months. I didn't expect it, I was thinking I would start coding at once, going through my huge todo list of various projects.
  • I enjoyed being able to go SUP surfing at will, but I ended up actually less on the water than before, simply because i didn't feel pressured into going on the water if the conditions were not enjoyable: I have now all the time in the world, I can wait for better conditions.
  • I started what I should have done years ago: Stretching at least 30 minutes daily, and warming up a full 10 minutes before going surfing. Work and play for me were mainly sitting in front of a computer, and I had become awfully stiff. I will detail my routine in later posts, it is worth it.
  • I dived deep in modern physics: astrophysics, cosmology and quantum mechanics. This also will warrant a full separate post.
  • I started re-coding in the last four months:
    • The first month I began working on various bits of code (shell scripts), progressively getting back to speed, and also deciding to learn the language Go. I was looking for a very longtime for an efficient language to replace lisp or C as compliment to scripting (I never liked Java), and was hesitating between Rust and Go. A discussion with Olivier Arsac convinced me to try Go.
    • I switched to git (I was using mercurial) for version control, and moved my publicly available source codes from my personal web site to my GitHub. It may sound ridiculous, but at now 61, setting things up so they do not disappear when I do is becoming an important consideration. I will thus progressively stop using self-hosted sites to publish on places that will survive me, as nobody in my family is tech-savvy enough to maintain a web site.
    • Then in December I stumbled upon the Advent of Code challenge that I decided to do in bash for the challenge, and it was unexpectedly productive? I learned more in these 25 puzzles than in my last 10 years of professional bash scripting. You can see my solutions in my post Bash lessons learned with AoC 2021.
    • Thus, after finishing the Go tutorial, I decided to do the previous AoC years in Go. And I just finished the AoC 2015 in Go. This definitively made me a Go enthusiast, I realized that the designers of Go had exactly the same opinion of what should be a general programming language: They worshiped readability, simplicity, performance and maintainability while hating inheritance and the feature creep of most modern languages.

That was my first year. And now, embarking for the next one!