This blog took a long time, but I finally finished it. I hope you enjoy it. I was busy with my college exams, so I couldn’t write this blog earlier. January 2023 was really busy for me

Unlike last year I won’t be writing about what I did in 2022. 2022 Was a fun year I did a lot of things. Finally socializing with people, after covid. I also started my college in physical form, after 2 years of online classes.

Here, I will be writing more about technical side of things. Things I learnt last year or found useful.

To be honest last year was more about changing landscape of technology than me. Last year was all about amazing artificial intelligence and machine learning tools and applications. I will be writing about them in this blog.

Many companies saw themselves either fall or succumb to the competition. One of these was Heroku. This is where I first hosted my first Django application. Last year they decided to stop their free tier. Let me start with

technologies I played with #

I worked with lot of new things. Tried different languages and, for example lisp and learnt how new languages can teach new things and new way of doing things. Through LISP i learnt way to deal with differently and everyone should try it. Rust is growing in industry as well as in my mind. Recent stable version of Linux has rust code in it. It is great to work with and took time to get used to it. Did projects in embedded and c for microcontrollers also. And those are not ergonomic at all, especially if we are talking about PIC. I used it for coursework and will be using it or arm cortex in the future. Great stuff but inaccessible unlike modern programming scene.

I did a few projects in NextJs this year and… its great. It is less painful way to deal with react. It being opinionated makes it even better. And on top of that newer version and its announcement making it stand alongside react itself. This was great year to start NextJS from employability perspective.

I tried supabase with one of the project I made in NextJS and it is amazing. It is just postgres but basic queries made super smooth for you including joins. I used vercel to host the front-end of the project, and that brings me to the

websites and tools #

I found a great deal of amazing web applications and tools. This is non exhaustive list.

Neon is a fully managed Postgres database hosting service. And it is every bit as good as it sounds. These guys are focusing on a single thing and doing it really well.
Fly.io is a cloud platform for developers. It is a great alternative to Heroku. It is a bit more expensive than Heroku but it is worth it and again it is every bit as good as it sounds.
Render.com is another alternative to heroku. And more or less provides the same services as Heroku.
Vercel is a another cloud platform for developers especially for Next.js and React applications.

A more thorough list can be found in my brain dump. This year was filled with

amazing innovations #

2022 was one of the most exciting year for technology if we exclude economic crisis as well as frauds related to crypto-currencies in one form or the other. Most innovation was seen in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

We first saw a glimpse with github copilot. But it was not general purpose and was aimed towards developers. All the hype started with the release of Dall-E. It is a generative model that could generate images from text and from another images. My invitation request got accepted around july last year and it feels every bit as magical as it was promised to be.

Public was confused about what to do with it already and then we got relatively open midjourney and fully open source Stable diffusion. It changed how we saw generative models, legal rights related to art, licenses and many other things. And most of the people still more or less ignored it. It did not affect layman but at of the end of the year we got ChatGPT. It changed everything. It grew up to be next big thing in the field of not just artificial intelligence but also in the field of technology. Right now google has already showed its own version of chatgpt.