Hey,what's up? Nothing,nothing,nothing,nothing.
Work
I still didn’t change jobs in 2022, and for at least the next year, I’m no longer planning to. My idea last year was simple enough: finish a Vue.js course, then move on. Instead, I got stuck on JavaScript’s prototype chain because of my own lack of discipline. Looking back, it’s almost funny. Something that could probably be learned in three days ended up being dragged out for half a year.
A big reason for that procrastination was that I had already started thinking about leaving programming behind as my main career. Once that happened, my motivation for coding dropped quite a bit. I also deliberately scaled back my tech stack to Vue.js + Node.js. From the perspective of a professional programmer, that stack may not be especially competitive, but for the kind of work I want to do in the future, it fits me well.
If programming is no longer going to be the main job, then there’s no need to obsess over language performance the way companies often do. For personal open-source projects and tools I’ll use myself, this setup is more than enough. Being able to use one familiar syntax for both frontend and backend feels smooth, and if I focus on learning JavaScript fundamentals well, it removes a lot of mental overhead.
People who’ve followed my blog for a while probably already know what that new goal is: I want to become a public school teacher. I did put in some real effort at the beginning, but I couldn’t maintain the momentum, and in the end my exam results were nothing like what I had expected. For a mix of reasons, I failed to pass the teacher certification exam in one go. Even so, my commitment to that path has only become firmer. There are still plenty of challenges ahead, but I don’t intend to keep retreating into hesitation and laziness.
Life
Coffee is just a drink
At the beginning of the year, I got pulled into making coffee at home after reading a newsletter article that made it sound irresistibly appealing. By the end of the year, I was ready to sell off all my coffee gear. The whole process left me with one clear conclusion: coffee is just a drink.
I originally wanted to enjoy hand-brewed coffee for its supposedly pure flavor and to experience the layered differences between beans. But the deeper I got into it, the more it started to feel like a kind of mysticism. The real problem was that I had no reliable benchmark.
Chain coffee from places like Luckin or Starbucks is often dismissed by specialty coffee professionals as little more than “dishwater,” so those obviously couldn’t serve as a standard. Specialty coffee shops, meanwhile, vary wildly in quality and are hard to judge. What does truly good coffee actually taste like? I didn’t know. If I followed a brewing guide carefully, did the result meet specialty coffee standards? I didn’t know that either. Without a benchmark, the whole exercise felt ungrounded.
After spending so much time and money experimenting, the coffee I made still wasn’t as pleasing to my taste as what I could get from a chain shop. At that point, there wasn’t much reason to keep fussing with it. So yes—goodbye, coffee. You’re just a drink after all.
Turning the blog into a life archive was the right call
In my plans for 2022, I mentioned that I wanted to shift my blog away from being purely technical and turn it into a place for all kinds of thoughts and daily records. Looking back now, that was absolutely the right decision.
I probably published more posts in 2022 than in any previous year, and most of them were about life rather than tech. I used plenty of apps in the past to record everyday moments, but those services either switched to subscriptions or shut down entirely. Now I don’t have to worry about that anymore.
Was shutting down the company the right move?
This question came back to me near the end of the year when I wanted to make custom WeChat red envelopes. One of the reasons I registered the company in the first place was to access some of WeChat’s more advanced APIs and features. Now that the company has been officially dissolved, those permissions are gone too.
To be honest, I’d already learned my way through most of the pitfalls of handling taxes on my own, so in hindsight, closing the company really may not have been the smartest move. But it’s done now, and overthinking it won’t change anything. Better to adjust my mindset and look for the upside.
The essence of camping is socializing
A large chunk of my entertainment spending in 2022 went into camping gear. Maybe that was because camping was suddenly everywhere, or maybe it was the excitement I got from watching Laid-Back Camp. During the Double 11 shopping season, I bought quite a bit of equipment.
Unfortunately, by the time everything arrived, the pandemic situation flared up again, and after that winter set in, which made camping less practical. Some of the gear still hasn’t been used even once. I’m hoping that once spring comes around this year, I’ll finally get more chances to go.
The best part of camping is never the gear itself anyway. It’s inviting friends out, grilling together, playing board games, and if the conditions are right, staying overnight and looking up at a sky full of stars.
My “gaming burnout” got cured
At some point, I stopped being able to get excited about video games. Then, in the second half of the year, I happened to play The Legend of Zelda while following a strategy video, and unexpectedly, games became fun again.
I think a big part of that was the sense of companionship from the on-screen comments in the video. Seeing other people react to the exact same levels, complain about the same things, and share the same experience made it feel less lonely. Later on, I also had Nintendo Switch Sports to play, and just like that, the condition I jokingly called my “gaming impotence” was cured.
Jazz & City Pop
My gateway into jazz was the first track, “悪女,” from the album 激情~中島みゆき作品集. As the title suggests, the album draws from the work of Miyuki Nakajima, whose songs have supported what feels like half of the Chinese-language music scene. Maybe it was because I already liked her so much, or maybe it was because the piano arrangement preserved the original melody so well, but the song sounded incredibly pleasing to me. Before that, most jazz I heard just felt chaotic and disordered.
My entry point into City Pop was “Plastic Love,” the song that famously exploded on YouTube in 2017. It first appeared on Mariya Takeuchi’s 1984 studio album VARIETY, and later became hugely popular thanks to YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. I didn’t hear it until 2022, but that did nothing to reduce how much I loved it.
I’ll stop here when it comes to music for now. I’m planning to write a separate retrospective focused just on the music I listened to in 2022.
Love
After moving, the quality of life for both me and Fa Gao dropped in ways that were hard to miss, and we started arguing more often too. It really did echo that old line I wrote back in my 2020 recap: when money is tight, everything feels harder for a couple.
The good news is that next year, we should finally be able to buy a home where we’re living now and settle down. Of course, that may also be bad news, because renovation is waiting on the other side like a giant sinkhole. Still, I hope everything goes smoothly. If it does, life should gradually get better for us.
And for the guys out there: when we argue, one song I sometimes listen to is “トリセツ” by Kana Nishino.
Plans
Looking ahead
After three long years, the pandemic finally came to an end, but tensions across the Taiwan Strait still hover in the background. There isn’t much ordinary people can do about the bigger picture. What we can do is live our own lives as well as we can, and keep moving toward the goals we’ve chosen.