It’s been a while since I last posted on this blog (almost 4 years!), as life has been demanding a lot of attention. I may be able to start writing with a bit more frequency, or at least that’s what I hope.
So, what have I been up to? Well, a bunch of things.
I started a consulting business!
I finally decided to take the plunge and start my own business. It’s a little one-man operation, but it has been a really good experience so far. I was quite scared about starting this venture because A) I live in a country that I am still struggling to properly understand and navigate, and B) It represents change, and sometimes change can be scary.
I’ve been able to adapt, though, and have managed to learn a lot about my profession and about myself, I recommend it if you feel curious about starting your own venture.
I am also doing my master’s degree!
I am very happy about this one.
I grew up in the poorest province of a not-very-rich country, and all my life I never thought this was the sort of opportunity I would normally have access to. I am pretty hard-working and not all that dumb, though, and with a little bit of luck I managed to get the chance to start working towards my MS in CS (Artificial Intelligence specialization and all!).
It has been an absolute blast, and I have managed to learn a lot! I am not done yet, though (still missing 3 courses), but at a one-course-per-semester pace, I will probably be able to finish by the end of 2026.
I genuinely never thought I would, but it seems like I will, and that makes me feel very fortunate.
I started learning about cloud computing
AWS, mostly.
It started due to my frustration when it came to making my code and projects run and be accessible. I always felt (also at work) that I had just half of the equation: being able to write code and create running software. When it came to actually running that code for customers or users, I started to feel my skills were not enough.
I mean, sure, I could spin up a Heroku dyno and make my Rails app available to users, but I felt like my limited knowledge and capacity to provision infrastructure was getting in the way, and that I would not be able to reach my full professional potential until I started learning proper cloud skills.
Turns out I love it! It is fun to work with these systems, and with tools like CDK I feel even more confident in building 100% of the application, infrastructure and all. I even got the solutions architect certification, and hopefully this year, if everything goes well, I will also manage to get the Pro level SA cert.
This was a surprisingly happy thing to get into. I could not recommend it enough.
Got really serious about learning Hungarian
I live in Hungary, and this year finally became the year where I started to properly learn Hungarian.
It’s not because I’ve been lazy or didn’t care to learn the language, though, it was about lack of learning resources. As you can imagine, there are not a lot of people learning Hungarian every year, which means the market for learning material is relatively small. This, as a result, means that there won’t be an abundance of quality language books or workbooks to use in your learning project.
Well, they did actually publish a series of great books from levels A1-B2 between 2022-2024, but I did not find out until this year, so yeah, I have no excuse to put it off any longer. I even got seriously into it.
It’s been a lot of fun, and at the moment this is probably my favorite hobby.
Also, life just keeps on marching
Lots of other things happened, like in any other person’s life. Some great, some tough, some happy, some difficult. Still, despite having some extremely tiring and trying times (pandemic, life challenges, illness, the aftermath of a loved one passing), it has been perhaps the best period of my life so far.
Not that I want to repeat those challenges, though, I think I’ve earned some well-deserved break. We’ll see if life allows it.
And a little something else
I recently decided to start building a project I have wanted to work on for the best part of a decade.
I cannot say much about it yet, still working hard on creating a good foundation, but I really hope it’s something that manages to help many people. So, instead of writing a bunch of stuff about it, I will instead go now and continue working on it, which makes more sense, right?
It’s nice to be back
I missed writing, I really did.
It’s nice to do it again.
Thanks for being on the other side, reader.