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.
    • 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!