2023 Delights and Not So Delightfuls

December 9, 2023

Things I found Delightful & Not-So-Delightful in 2023

Year #2 of ‘getting into tech.’ Feeling reflective, wanted to jot down some things that have brought me joy as well as a few things that just frustrated the hell out of me this year.

Delightful

Linux Chromebook

Oh boy is linux fun! Bought a chromebook with ubuntu off a friend, and it has slowly become my primary personal machine. Trackpad sucks, bluetooth headphones sometimes don’t connect great (delay or just terribly quality). Other than that, it’s pretty sweet.

Advent of Code

This one is fun on its own, but also a treat because it’s very much something I would have hit a wall on 12 months ago. Did the first two days in NodeJS, but then switched back to python in anticipation of problems getting harder.

Neetcode

Helped me get over the dread/fear of leetcode. Really reinforced stuff I had learned first year of my program in a big way. Love that guy.

Various GPT assists

Including but not limited to:

helping me parse hex output of jpeg to find relevant compression tables
unzipping strange file format on weather data from nasa, just completely transforming this impenetrable black box into charts of the data inside (feel like it’s performance on tasks like this is all over the map. This one though blew me away)
Writing first bash scripts

Finding Local Geek Community

Started going to meet ups and such this year. Met a lot of cool people.

Automating my life

Taking baby steps with this one. The biggest hurtle was just getting over the fact that (especially for me right now) automating the task will take orders of magnitude longer than just doing the task by hand.

Not-Delightful

‘Hello World’ on the Cloud

Initial thought: I wish I knew more about the cloud. I should do just like a really simple personal project. How hard could it be to have a button on my website that links to a single .mp3 file on AWS?

It wasn’t even that hard, exactly, but it took a lot of steps.

Make an account with AWS, which took generating a key.
Giving it my CC details.
Make a sub-account for my account on AWS (don’t remember if that one needed a key too).
Setting permissions for my sub-account (both main account and sub account are just my name, so super confusing) so it can do things.
Load the .mp3 to an S3 bucket.
Set up a Heroku account (ChatGPT told me it had a good free tier, which I guess it used to but doesn’t anymore) with another key generation.
Give Heroku my CC details.
Write a server script that generates an expiring pass or whatever to access the AWS bucket.
Get that server script on Heroku.

And then it worked! And I left it alone, and over the next month or so I got bills from AWS and Heroku for like $0.50-$2.00. And so then I went in and I cancelled what I had made. But AWS kept charging me! For ‘Key Management Service’. So I closed my account and now I guess if I wanna use AWS again I’ll have to use a different email.

Getting blocked with Selenium

I get why websites don’t want me writing scripts to crawl all over them. But I was just trying to educate myself, on an educational website (udemy), and write a script to check the annoying little boxes on my online course but no dice and it was especially annoying because I had already gone to all the trouble of like chrome-inspecting which elements I needed to grab in the script before I got blocked.

Wire Shark

Didn’t make me tear my hair out but I hate stuff where you can’t even really get close to first principles of understanding because everything is just encrypted and confusing.

Github learning curve

Love github, hated learning how to use it.

LLM anxiety

What a weird time to be alive. With 2 years of ‘getting into tech’ experience and 1 year of ‘chatGPT prompt artist’ experience, I can do crazy things that I have only the shallowest understanding of, getting out over my skis in historically anomalous ways . It’s great but also weird as hell.