Hello all.

This is the first time I have decided to do a year wrapping up post and there are a few reasons for this. Which I hope will become clear throughout the post.

First of I do not have a full statics of how many actually read my blog. But I can see that the traffic is increasing for certain posts. So thank you to all whom are reading and sorry for not posting more regularly. I hope to be more consistent in the new year with a least one post a month. But we will see if that will happen.

Now let us talk QueryC++ for a little bit in my post [QueryC++] Status Update and Apology, I talked about why the development has not advancend so much. But this post was back in may, so why has more not happened. Well first of all it has, I just haven pushed it to the repo, more on this later. But another factor has played in a lot. I work as a Software Engineering Consultant and I really like the consultancy through which I work.

However, now the bad part. Earlier this year I was assigned to a customer which I was really looking forward to. The project was interesting and I saw a lot of potential. But after I week I honestly could not wait to get a way from this customer, for reasons I cannot speak about publicly. Yet I can speak about what this (for me) very painful period at the customer result in. Quite simply put it resulted in extreme stress, panic attacks, inability to relax, and other less pleasureable side effects. Basically things I got over four years ago. All the work I had put into getting control over my stress in the last decade or so came crumbling down. It left me extremly drained and beaten down.

I enjoyed (enjoy) solving leetcode puzzles. Yet the stress beat me down so bad that I did not believe in my own skills and I found that I could not even start a leetcode puzzle. Due to the fact that I did not beleive I could complete it anyways, even the easy ones. It was not good.

This spilled into other aspects of my life. I no longer wanted to pay Warhammer why bother I sucked anyway and it also resulted in me being unable to work on QueryC++. I should have been more open about these issues, but I simply could not. Bascally the only at home hobby I still retained was baking as that felt like the only thing I could not fuck up.

Now 2024 was all a bad. It was actually really good if I look at it overall. I met my in laws for the first title. My girlfriend got the new title of wife. I mannaged to get back to painting Warhammer and reading. But most importantly, I started realising that my job is not everything and that it is okay that I take vacations. This I have taken full advantage off, which has helped a lot.

This alone make me feel like I go into 2024 much strong than I was. It also makes me believe that 2024 will be the year where I finally get more time to work with QueryC++. Additionally I have another project going on the side which I hope I can reveal more about in Q2 of 2024. But we will see how well I will follow my own plans.

Best wishes for a happy new year.

./Lars