2021 in review

It’s time to reflect on the year of 2021.

I started the year of 2021 by making several adjustments on how I do my finances, listen to music and read the news. As the year is ending it’s sufficient to say that most of my adjustments failed.

As for finances I’m back using YNAB. I tried to apply the YNAB method to hledger as outlined in my post but after 6 months it felt like I wasn’t using the right tool for the job. There is too much flexibility in hledger for me. There has been development in the personal budgeting space and hopefully an YNAB like, open-source solution emerges.

For music, I’m now back using Spotify, but I ditched the official client in favor of ncspot. Creating my own offline music collection was made too difficult by the poor quality CDs available at my local libraries. I still support my favorite artists via Bandcamp.

I still consume more news than I should though I feel that reading more books has helped to be more focused. I finished 19 books this year, fiction and non-fiction and I aim to increase that number for the next year.

I worked on Cute Chess throughout the year of 2021. My biggest contributions to the project were porting Cute Chess to Qt 6 and implementing unit tests for the Xboard protocol. Ilari and I held the annual Cute Chess hackathon in June.

Something that I want to focus more on in 2022 is Rust. I wrote early learnings in May and I’ve started new project on Rust that takes it further what I’ve learned. More on this project later.

That’s all I have for this month. See you next year!