2023 in review

As you can see by the delay this post is published, I’ve been unsure whether I should even write it or not. The last year was weird, hard, and sad in so many ways. It feels like there is war and hate everywhere in the world. While I’m extremely that I’m not yet directly affected by it, it and other events have taken a toll. Our cat also passed away this autumn leaving a big hole in our lives. Even the holidays and the preparations for them felt hard and stressful this time time.

Luckily, we had already anticipated that the holidays would be quite stressful and so didn’t even try to get tickets for this year’s 37C3 in Hamburg. Perhaps next year but only if we manage to organise everything to be less stressful…

But enough of the bad parts. 2023 offered a lot of great things to remember! I want to focus on these in this post starting off with all the nice places I went to despite not doing all that much conference traveling anymore!

Places & Traveling

• As always, the first real trip of the year was to Brussels for FOSDEM. Unfortunately, we couldn’t be the usual travel party this year due to illnesses but, on the plus-side, the weather was much nicer this year! There was even some sun!
• Right after returning from Brussels I had the chance to get to know some of my new coworkers at an in-person event. Stressful but just great to meet everyone!
• For our main summer vacation we went to the Styrian Salzkammergut which was just marvellous. For some reason I didn’t write a complete trip summary but I at least left some reviews (Zloam Wirt, train connection, Seewiese Altaussee).
• In October we went with friends to Hamburg for an extended weekend. For some reason I never had time to do proper sightseeing there on previous trips and had lots of fun! Of course, as one does, I spent the week after returning sick in bed 😅
• For work but also personal reasons I spent a lot of time in Vienna this year. So much so that we even briefly considered renting an apartment there as hotel prices exploded especially in the second half of the year.

Work

2023 was my first year of working 100% remotely. As expected, I require a change in scenery at least every once in a while and so did traveling and train-office but primarily also got a Regus subscription which I use to spend at least one day each week (in theory) at one of their office locations (mostly in Graz and Vienna).

I will probably write more about this in the future as I’ve visited quite a few of their locations during the last 12 months.

Setup

My personal setup hasn’t changed all that much since last year with one exception: Obsidian has become an integral tool for pretty much everything I do. I now also write all my blog posts in it! The setup isn’t perfect yet, but since August I can post to this blog.

On the pen & paper front I managed to actually fill most of the Hobonichi Techo and thought long hard if I should keep using it also for the new year. No matter what: Journaling is now a fixture as it allows me to write down some thoughts that are simply not suitable for a public space like this. I also started to use Fixion pens for my operational journal (a passport-sized Traveler’s Notebook) … they are nice but there not being a properly black one makes me switch to a fountain pen even on the go again and again.

Live events!

For some reason I went to a lot of live events, at least for me. It all started with seeing Alex Kristan in Klagenfurt in February. In June we saw Kalkbrenner and later Kaya Yanar with Carpenter Brut following in November.

Not much more to write about these here but for new year I already have some tickets, so 2024 should be at least as exciting as the previous year!