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2023 in review

3 min read

New projects

Professional

Since May 2017, I have been working on user interfaces for enterprise key management solutions – namely IBM Enterprise Key Management Foundation and then its much improved cloud version – Unified Key Orchestrator (which won a design award).

In January, I had the opportunity to join another, much bigger project. I was ready for a new challenge, so I accepted it.

It is one of the biggest single page applications I have ever worked on, with several hundreds of components and quite complex state management.

I helped develop new features and during the process, I also learned a lot about CKEditor 5 by writing custom plugins for it.

Personal

I finally got to some side projects that I had on my mind for a long time.

GitHub activity

 

I plan to contribute more to open source repositories this year.

Events

In March, I participated in an internal CTF event organized by the company, which was great fun. I was impressed by the challenges that the organizers came up with, some of them were left unsolved. I particularly enjoyed the reverse engineering challenges, and I was excited to be able to utilize and learn about all the tools that are available these days.

I also made sure that I won't miss talks from the latest conferences (both internal and external), I can say that I've seen quite a few presentations and talks on various topics (mostly related to software development and information security).

New hardware

Workstation

As I mentioned in my previous post, I've replaced my old desktop with a new laptop. You can read about my experience with it here.

Smartwatch

Despite my initial reluctance to ever buying a smartwatch, I decided to try one for its vitals monitoring capabilities and life saving features such as fall/crash detection. There are several reports of people whose lives were saved thanks to a smart watch.

What's next

Here's a short list of things that I'd like to do this year.

  • Get involved in open source projects
  • Work on my blog
  • Do some 3D stuff again (I have fond memories creating custom video game maps)
  • Write a combined reflection covering all the previous years