This is the one year I wished it didn't have to end.

While I think I have done a lot of things this year, I consider it as a fairly relaxing year - and one of my happiest years to date, minus all the anxieties looming in the back. I'll share some memories I had this year first, then a bit of the reflection and learnings I got from this year.

Starting off 2022 with a walk in the park.

I have always been a big fan of parks, nature, and especially places with water. Every time I am stressed and in need of disconnecting or in need of ideas, parks are the place to be. Walking in the city at night helps too.

I remembered wandering around the park, and suddenly having ideas for Creatorsgarten's future. I opened my laptop (yes, a weird thing to do in parks), and called my friend Pub. Looking back, I went to the park much less often in the later months of the year, since I don't have much stress anymore.

I took a one-year break from work.

At the end of January, there was a sudden layoff at my previous company.

I was working in an engineering leadership role back then. My personal themes for last year is breaking limits and overcoming fears, so I wanted to try to exceed my comfort zone of being a software engineer, and see if I can push my soft skills to the limit.

During my time there, I really put my all into it. Yet my obvious lack of experience resulted in a healthy dose of failures - in a good way. Looking back, I think it is the right choice that I accepted the role. It's quite an experience for a 20-year-old to lead a large team, and I think I did grew up as a person.

With that being said, 2022 was stressful for me. The leadership role was challenging, and I didn't write any code at work for almost a year.

The layoff gave me the final push to leave the company to start taking care of myself, take a long break from corporate work, and pursue my dreams.

Second round of data driven love.

We did the second Data Driven Love meetup - it's a silly little meetup where we talk about relationships, and how software influences relationships (e.g. dating apps). The last time we did it was in 2019, so this brings back memories.

Second trip to Khon Kaen.

I needed to clear my headspace and think about the next steps. I remembered going to Phu Pha Man (ภูผาม่าน) a long time ago, back when Facebook was acquiring OmniVirt and I had to practice coding interviews, and I figured this would be the best place to be in this time of unpredictability.

Back in February, P'Kul was hosting a Golang meetup in the campground, with the region's signature mountain Phu Pha Man. Fun fact - the "Man" (ม่าน) part means "curtain" in Thai, you can see the resemblance. This photo was when we were preparing for the event.

On another note, Khon Kaen has quite a lot of nice landscapes. Not sure which plant this is though, I should touch more grass...

We went to Florida!

I went on my last business trip to Florida with P'Gno. I've known Gno for almost seven years. By the way, this is my first time in my life seeing and touching snow!

Also, this is my 2nd time on a Tesla. I still haven't learned how to drive yet, but seeing sports mode in action is really cool. Maybe I should aim to get a car this year...

We then went to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The exhibition part is very detailed, very well made. It's pretty cool to see a lot of thought put into a museum - I wish we'd have something of this scale in Thailand.

The Apollo launch control room is awesome. They used the actual control rooms to tell the story - how cool is that!

This is the actual part of the rocket too.

Same as this space shuttle!

Here's me and the NASA logo. Could I be a NASA or CERN engineer someday?

Most memorably, we watched a SpaceX launch at Cape Canaveral. With the little spark of rocket ignitions, the night sky and the suddenly lit up like it's high noon. One moment it's reflecting on the surface of the lake, another moment it's dark and still. Luckily for us, the launch went well that day.

Also, we touched some grass! We went on a trail in Florida.

Florida's nature is surprisingly beautiful. I thought it's gonna be on the dry side, but it's perfect for walks.

Time for some coding :)

More on that work trip: we went to the PromoStandards conference as our team won the hackathon. It's my first time winning an international hackathon. I did both the pitching and the code for this project, and it turned out great. Getting to see the guts and insides behind a mature industry in first hand is quite an experience. The business world isn't as scary as I thought.

While we wait for layovers at LA, we went to Santa Monica Pier for some Bubba Gump shrimps, then the Griffith Observatory. I got a lot of nice souvenirs and snow globes!

The seafood was quite good!

The griffith observatory's exhibits was also quite well made. There's a room downside where they showed a bunch of stars as well.

They have this big statue outside of the observatory - there is also a snowglobe of this which I bought.

The iconic "Hollymood" mountain is also in the distance.

A six-year re-occurring, waking dream.

I usually took japanese-style Onsen baths to relax, and let my thoughts flow without distractions. I have been pondering about a "dream" of mine, an idea that has reoccurred for over six years on what I wanted to build.

One of my lifelong goals is to help developers (and other problem solvers) to be more creative; be more crazy. I think software engineering skills is like magic: it enables us to make things happen that shouldn't have been possible - an essentiae of the hacker culture.

I believe that to navigate the unknown and tumultous future, we need to build a strong foundation for the next generation: the drive to be curious, learn by building things, and broaden their horizons and perspectives. That later cultivates into Creatorsgarten.

This goal has always shaped my projects over the past seven years, from the earliest ones such as The Stupid Hackathon Bangkok and Young Creator's Camp.

There's probably over thousands of Markdown documents, posts and drawings, and millions of words I wrote over many years prior, all variations on these ideas: Hacker House, Creator's Playground, Young Creator's Initiatives, Democratize Creation for All. I'll publish them in this garden someday.

This dream is one of my primary reason for taking this break from work. While on the Florida trip, as I already decided to leave this company, I thought a lot about what I want to explore and do in this one-year break.

Bangkok Open Source Hackathon.

On that note, while I was still in Florida, I remembered having a call with my team right before the first day of the Bangkok Open Source Hackathon starts.

I wished I could've been there in person, but I knew I had to trust my team and doze off. The moment I woke up, the first day was over.

This is probably one of our biggest hackathons that we've hosted so far, with over 600 participants in total - and it's one of the best moments that helped kickstart this year for me.

Here's a bit of context of how it all started: last year, the Thai Programmer Association folks asked me if I can help with their Digipolis hackathon - a hackathon for Thai developers to build solutions for Bangkok.

My co-host Pub asked us if we can take over this project and do it our way, and so we did. However, I didn't have any motivation at first, as this kind of "social good" hackathons are a dime a dozen. I need a twist.

While taking a new year's break with my parents, I thought of an idea for a fully open source style of hackathon, where people would build open-source software together in teams to solve Bangkok problems.

Overall, it was a lot of work! It took almost 6 months of preparation, and in the end we hosted 2 days worth of workshop sessions, and 3 days of open hack and presentations, spanning entire February and March - but it's definitely worth it!

After our second workshop, we went to the board game place. I'm horrible at board games though, so I mostly just watch others play it.

Our third workshop was the Open Hack Day. Here are the 3 folks that arrived first.

Then they all form into their own groups. Another day of productive discussion!

We used Discord, FigJam and MediaWiki for collaboration.

The open hack session is open to people who didn't originally signed up for the hackathon too, so it's nice seeing people contributing and joining the teams ad-hoc.

Just like that, the third workshop day was over. We were quite exhausted...

And a few weeks later, it's time for the final hack days.

There's about 12 teams that did the pitching. Some teams wrote on their table - a creative way of collaboration!

Just like that, the hackathon was over. We had quite a blast!

Fun Fact: the vice-mayor/vice-governor of Bangkok, P'Sanon, took the event's final photo for us! He's a genuinely nice person.

Trip to Singapore.

At the start of April, I flew to Singapore to give a talk on how we organized the Bangkok Open Source Hackathon at the FOSSAsia conference.

It's a conference on open-source software, with many interesting and in-depth talks that I don't really get to hear anywhere else: RISC-V, assistive technology, open source silicon toolchain, SLAM.

I wish conferences in Thailand goes into the silicon and CPU architecture level - and diversify the content a bit.

The SLAM and LIDAR programming part is also quite interesting. I love talks that goes into the algorithm behind technologies we take for granted, not only just selling the framework.

I learned that GovTech in Singapore is really something else. I liked the Purple Hat talk where they build their own open-source lighthouse for accessibility checks, which is super inspiring. There's a neat live-coding performance session too.

I got to meet many awesome people in open source. I met with folks from the Hack Club, which later inspired me a ton in building Creatorsgarten - I'm so glad I met Sam and the folks. The karaokes were fun, and the people from the hackerspace meetup was nice!

I also did explore Singapore a bit more - went to Haw Par Villa (Hell's Museum. Reminds me of Wat Suthat วัดสุทัศน์ in Thailand), ArtScience Museum (again), got some food at Maxwell, did a long walk at Gardens By The Bay, and went back to Bangkok.

Creative Coding Meetup

P' Thai hosted the first Creative Coding Meetup, and there's a lot of cool talks on how to use code to generate visual and sounds. That event later inspired me to build the Visual Assembly Canvas, as well as organizing the Algorave event in 2024.

Board Game with Kids

My friend Danthai invited me to teach board games to kindergarten / primary-school kids. I'm not a big fan of board games, but I thought it would be inline with the exploration theme of this year - to do things I've never done before. Turns out I'm bad with board games after all, but I'm quite good at dealing with kids - so it did went well, and a memorable experience for me.

Hack.go.th and 9Geek.

We spent a fair amount of time in April & May discussing to various people on the next stage of the Bangkok Open Source initiative - the Hack.go.th initiative.

While I was at lunch break from the board game classes, I was invited by Jabont to kickoff the 9geek community. I recalled I joined in Slack and was very excited by the interesting technical topics, so much that I advocated for it in my Thai circles.

Sooner or later, the community exploded and we were the biggest Discord group in Thailand in literally the second day, with over 200,000 members. However, it was a bit too overwhelming for me, so I focused my attention in the coding projects instead, helping them with some server deployments stuff, and later the ThaiUI project.

I recalled meeting with Dr. Sak from ETDA, with folks from Bangkok Metropolitan Administration and Move Forward Party teams. There is a lot of productive conversations, although we didn't made a lot of progress as there are other projects. I also joined their mini-barcamp as well.

We had some good progress for the ThaiUI project, courtesy of Pub, and we've given 2 talks on our researches - in the CSS Meetup and in the KaoGeek meetup. I'm looking forward to resume the development of ThaiUI in 2024 though! That would be a great open source project if we can make it happen.

Functional Programming Meetup

We had the first functional programming meetup in May. The topics was quite hardcore, but enjoyable for me.

Even though the talks was quite dense, I liked the vibe of these meetups where the emphasis is more on having smaller discussions.

Reasoning with Discrete Maths & Humanistic Architecture

Two of the classes I had this year was amazing - hats off to P' Dave and P' Chris! I loved these kind of classes that doesn't just teach how to use tools or frameworks, but goes into the fundamentals and principles - mathematics, humanism or otherwise.

It's safe to say I highly recommend both classes - go for it if you have time! I used a lot of materials from P' Chris' Humanistic Architecture class in my Creatorsgarten mentoring sessions, and safe to say I'll use it in my later jobs too. (I'm on a break from work at the moment.)

Third trip to Khon Kaen

I was having an existential crisis sort of moment in the middle of the year. I was frustrated with not moving fast enough, not getting things done. I decided to travel to Khon Kaen again and meet with P' Kul.

On the first day, I got to eat an amazing steak.

The views were amazing. I feel like I could live here forever. Time seems to slow down to a halt, and I have much more headspace with less noise.

The signature "Pha Man" view is right in front of me, with nothing obscuring it. Can you imagine waking up to this view everyday? It's much better compared to living in a big city.

A big group of bats flew by in the distance. I remembered reading The Computational Beauty of Nature on boids and flocks on how we can model this in mathematics. Nevertheless, it's fascinating how nature is able to produce this.

I remembered reading around 3 - 4 books on that trip. I read Alchemy by Rory Sutherland, a great read on how psychology influences human's decision making, and how we should approach marketing and decision making.

In the evening, the mountain fog makes the air cool down a bit, and the view is even more amazing. We cooked some more steaks, and doze off to sleep.

I particularly loved the cafes there. It's a Japanese-themed cafe; there's usually not a lot of people there, so it's perfect for reading and relaxing.

Another book on my list was The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. That was quite a heavy read, but very insightful on how designers solve interaction problems, and how human behaviour works. I haven't finished this book yet, maybe I'll pick it up again next year.

I spent the time there reading books, and writing ideas for the Cluster.wiki on my notebooks, on how we can create a system of interlinked wikis using Git and Markdown as a base, with visual editors, graphs and federations. I might pick on that project later in 2024.

The Stupid Hackathon Thailand 7th

Can't believe it is already the seventh year, how crazy is that! This year's graphics is a huge upgrade from our previous events, thanks to Anri and the design team.

I remembered mostly goofing off, having fun and helping with some labour work. It's very different from past years, as I don't have to organize it myself anymore - haha.

I think this year went well, thanks to the organizing team spearheaded by Thee and Wit. Although, I think we would have to downscale it next year to retain the coziness and fun - there's too much pitching groups for this year.

Elm Meetup

I also met up with Charlon Ascoville to host our second functional programming meetup for the year, this time on the Elm language.

Overall it went great, with the mob programming workshops being quite fun.

As usual, we went to eat some mala afterwards! We also discussed about next projects there too.

A bit after that, we went and discussed the next projects: Maths at Sundown and Algorave.

Side Projects Showdown

Then came July, and I turned 22! We hosted our first Side Projects Showdown meetup - it went really well with a lot of amazing projects, although it might've been a bit of an information overload.

There's surprisingly many cool people and projects, I might host this again next year!

Maths at Sundown

A couple of days later, we hosted our Maths at Sundown event, spearheaded by Danthai and Ami. The panels were genuinely interesting, I enjoyed it quite a lot even though I'm a total noob at maths.

Who would have thought so many people are interested about a meetup about maths!

Second Trip to Singapore

I went to Singapore again for the CityJS conference. Our trip started with dinner with Chun and P' Mamook.

FYI - Mamook is the owner of the "Hungry Penguin" foodies channel, so I get to knew how foodie content are made too! That's quite a bonus.

Mamook recommended a great noodle place called "Fook Kin" - I would definitely eat this everyday if I could!

There's a pre-CityJS meetup hosted at the VMWare office as well, I met a couple of cool folks there.

The museum of ice cream was interesting, although I'm not an instagram type of person, so I mostly just enjoyed the ice cream and the exhibits.

The segway ride was the highlight of this trip for me! Huge thanks to Riffy and Thai for inviting me. I was scared as hell and couldn't ride it properly when we started off, but then it becomes quite fun when I got the hang of it.

We went along the lake to gardens by the bay.

The tour guide was very cool - he took a lot of great photos for us.

It's the "tRPC gang": Thai, Riffy, Poom and Chun. I guess all of us uses tRPC too?

I got some dope night shots of the city as well.

The conference was very well made! The conf started with this awesome talk on localizations.

I met Tobias, my previous boss too. Didn't knew he's in Singapore!

There is this interesting slide on the frontend ceiling too - serves as a reminder for me to not only focus on frontend, but also expand my perspectives.

Another of my favourite talk is "UNtestable" - very interesting to see how frontend end-to-end testing can be this nuanced, with a lot of possible edge cases.

I enjoyed the Module Federation talk too! I didn't knew the frontend story at ByteDance was that complex.

Evan You's talk was solid. Love to see the reflections on what went right, and what went wrong in releasing Vue 3. I'm a big fan of Vue.

After the conference, I spent a full day at the museum. It was honestly really well made, I remembered talking with my friends on how they've spent a huge amount of effort and polish into their national museum.

I know a huge part of it is for "narrative" purposes, but still this is leaps and miles better of many Thai museums I've been to. I think LKY is one hell of a leader.

My shorks also met a new friend, hehe!

I had a lot of fun with the shork photoshoots!

Also, we got to watch their preview round of the national day fireworks!

The aquarium at Sentosa was also very good - there's many rooms to explore, and there is a huge room in the middle with plenty of spaces to watch and enjoy to fishes.

There's a room where you can see the other sides of the huge fish tanks too.

And of course, the shork met their friends!

Soon after, the trip was over. Fun fact, the airport at Singapore has big circular tables you could make into a makeshift workspace!

How to learn almost anything 2

Another workshop we've hosted this year is How to Learn Almost Anything 2, a workshop on constructionism for younger students where we use world-building as medium for creativity.

I remembered using a lot of time to prepare for this event, mostly on sponsors and promoting it. Here's the organizing staffs and me, discussing about the event activities. By the way, I'm in charge of event activities and sponsorships.

Pub bought a lot of toys for the event, although I know part of him just wants to play with legos.

We also made some keychains.

I was way too busy running the whole activity, so I did not take any photos. I did record the reflection session though - it was very heartwarming to hear all the positive feedback. Either way, I used up a huge amount of energy for this event...

The event was a great success with a room full of participants (i.e. kids), and we got glowing feedback from the parents. Memee, Fay and I also got to do an interview and photoshoot with The Kommon on this. This is Creatorsgarten's second interview of this year if I recalled correctly.

Garden Zero Hack Club

I met with Chun and Pub to plan our next steps for building a hack club - I'm dying to build projects and get my hands dirty with code, but it would've been nice to do it with someone else.

A week later, we had our first hack club sessions.

To be honest, most of us probably spend time chatting about nerdy stuff, rather than writing actual code. Still - it's fun to meet with others once in a while.

We also went out for dinners later that day. I might host it again sometime next year.

Visual Assembly Canvas

I spent around 270 hours this year building the Visual Assembly Canvas tool to visualize stack machine assembly, and use it as an interactive patching environment.

The project started with trying to build a VM and compiler, but then the idea to build a highly interactive and visual infinite canvas in a couple of drawings turned this into a full-blown project.

I had a lot of fun with building my MIDI patcher, as MIDI is just number data it's quite easy to program just using simple stack machine instructions.

I started working on the "interactive visual canvas" aspect by adding a Pixel Art block - right now there are around 15 interactive blocks.

PS. Working outside of my room helps a lot to clear my headspace as well, the starbucks near River City Bangkok is a nice place for building projects.

I also managed to have Bad Apple working, decoded at 60FPS in the browser (12x12), as well as on the launchpad (8x8)

You can see the logbook in the From Opcodes to Algorithms project page - I am already on Day 33, with 16 journal entries / research notes written. I plan to continue this project towards the next year.

My next ideas would be to implement more languages and runtime other than stack machine assembly (e.g. lisp, ethereum virtual machine), and add support for visual and audio patching to be a usable DJ/VJ environment.

Fourth trip to Khon Kaen.

Some of our Thai tech community friends are going to Khon Kaen (again), and they've invited us to meet up at Phu Pha Man. I was having another one of many existential crisis of the year, so I invited my friend Chun to take a break together.

We soon arrived at Khon Kaen, having our first meal. I ordered their signature beef dish - the beef is a bit too chewy / sticky for my taste...

We then went to a nearby cafe to do some programming work. There's a nice local cafe not very far from the airport, near the city centre. We grabbed some cakes and coffee.

My shork seems to enjoy that green tea cake!

We then drove to Phu Pha Man, which is quite far from the airport. In my last two trips I used a convoluted chains of planes, trains and buses, but travelling by car is so much more nicer in Thailand...

Our place was super nice, with familiar lush scenery right outside the window.

The room interior was also quite nice, as it's a standalone house. There's a comfy bed and table.

This is so much better than I anticipated at first. I'll definitely come here again on the next trip.

Anyway, we did have an indie-hacking session while waiting for dinner to arrive. I was busy writing the Elysia research paper.

It was almost evening by then, with soft glow of the sun.

Fun fact: Moo Kata is extremely popular in Khon Kaen - I heard someone called it the City of Moo Kata. I wonder how they eat that so often!

I went back to our place to prepare to leave for the cafe. Here's how our room looked like in a wider angle.

And here is the photo taken at the window.

Next day, we went to the same cafe as our second trip. This time I'm not reading books, but writing the Elysia research paper as the submission deadline is nearing in.

Another thing I loved this cafe for is the view. I mean just look at that - you see yards of green sceneries in the distance. That greatly reduces stress.

The cafe was very cozy. This time, there isn't any customers around, so we're pretty much the only ones.

Outside of that cafe was a bunch of smaller places that you can stay at. The price is not very expensive, but it tends to get filled up fast.

Of course, it's time to feed my shork. I'm ordering some strawberry matcha drinks and strawberry shortcakes.

I took Moonlight to this trip too! The black plush is named Moonlight, and the green shork is named Mint Tea. If you can remember 20 of my plush names, I have a special gift for you.

We went for dinner at Sam Rab Lao (สำรับลาว), a nice restaurant. This is one of the fancier places which cost a lot more than most local restaurants, but the taste is worth it!

Next day, we went to another cafe. My friend Chun is feeding Mint Tea her share of yoghurts. Cute!

I wrote the paper while waiting for food to arrive.

We hopped to another nearby cafe, while waiting for other folks from the tech communities to arrive.

Again, paper writing time!

Later that night, we went for some Moo Kata dinner again.

That's a lot of people!

Next day, we went to do a bit of sightseeing to see some truly beautiful landscapes. Look at how clear this lake is!

Again, this is straight from my phone camera. No photo editing. It looked even better in real life.

Then I spent some time at a nearby waterfall.

This is one of the many smaller waterfalls in Khon Kaen.

There isn't a lot of people there.

PS. I'm fascinated by how well phone cameras can capture photos these days. Image processing technologies have come a long time.

Now for the fun part - we went camping! Yes we bought our laptop and mechanical keyboards to the tent, which defeats the whole purpose of getting outside to touch some grass...

I was writing Visual Assembly Canvas back then. Gotta write some assembly in the woods!

I'm not the only weird person, Chun was also doing some coding...?

I guess mother nature hated us for doing that - that night there was a sudden rainfall, and we foolishly removed the tent cover as Chun was complaining about tent being a bit hot.

Live wiring inside a tent, what could go wrong?

Yes, we put live 220V wiring into our tent. Yes, we were close to the brink of death. I'd probably already be electrocuted to death if it wasn't for Chun noticing the rain at the middle of the night.

I completely broke my MX Master 3 mouse, some AC charging ports in my power brinks, and some cables too. That was dumb.

To get my minds off me breaking important equipment, we traveled to see more nature.

I took my kindle out and read a couple of pages on the Crafting Interpreters book, while taking in the nature. I like reading books in the wilderness, it's a lot more relaxing than reading in my work room.

E-ink readers really work well in environments where there is a plenty of light.

I went to another popular waterfall, this time it's a proper waterfall with multiple floors I can swim on!

Even though it's popular, it's still relatively quiet with not a lot of people around.

Our trip was almost over at this point, so we went to our last hotel, Vinewood. They served a nice welcome gift for us.

We had a brief dinner with P' Kul before we left.

The food at this place was quite good, too!

Our last meal for this trip is at a super-fancy Thai restaurant, it was a surprisingly delicious clean food at a very quiet homestay, but also very pricey. I might stay here at my next trip.

New Keyboard!

Once I'm back from my trip, the Nuphy Air75 V2 keyboard I ordered a couple months back have arrived. I love this keyboard.

It's compatible with QMK/VIA, but I haven't customized it much yet.

Hacktoberfest 2024

Soon after, we had the yearly Hacktoberfest meetup. I was way too busy hosting this to be taking photos, but this is a funny one from Chun on tips to be indie hackers.

That's a lot of meals!

Another funny tidbit is I asked for 2 staffs to help me carry the meals to the meetup. For some reason, we keep meeting more people on the way, and suddenly it's 10 people just to grab a couple of food bags.

I soon went to a meeting with the Thai Programmer Association to formally be part of the current generation's team, and also to appoint the president of TPA. Congrats to P' Safe again!

Algorave

We also spent quite a lot of time preparing for the upcoming Algorave event.

We met with P' Kiang as well to get some advice on hosting algorave, over a BBQ Plaza dinner.

We thought of an interactive system for people to interact with the performances, audio and visual - but this was later scrapped as it would take too much time to build. Maybe for next event?

Right before the new year, we were discussing with a potential venue partner and meeting at nearby cafes. Stay tuned for the event in 2024!

SCB AI Hackathon

I was also invited to be a partner for SCB 10X's AI hackathon.

Weirdly enough, this is the first time I've seen the Creatorsgarten logo in a physical sign format. I should've kept this!

DIAGE Festival

As we're hosting the Algorave event soon, my friend Pub asked me to join him at the DIAGE festival to gather inspirations on how algorave events are hosted - and presumably also for him to enjoy the music.

This is my first ever music festival, as I'm obviously not a partygoer and usually not a big fan of electronic music - but this festival is so well done that I'm starting to enjoy it!

The audio, the bass, the visuals, the lights, the atmosphere. Everything fits very well.

Different bands certainly has different vibes to them, so it doesn't feel homogeneous. I enjoyed the style of this band too (I think it was JPBS perhaps?)

I didn't take much photos or videos as I just wanted to enjoy my time there. The shows there gave me a lot of inspiration for my Visual Assembly Canvas projects, and some ideas for building DJ/VJ tools for live performances.

It's my first time seeing people do serious live sets with Sonic Pi as well. I remembered sitting down to code my synthesizer in Rust and TypeScript while listening to their mixes, it was such a cool moment for me.

I loved the visuals and audio of the noise music too - it's using raw data to make music!

The scanlines, the frequencies, the damn vibe was so cool. I enjoyed that soundscapes a lot.

The light projection at the end is quite mind-boggling yet beautiful - I wonder how they did that. It's beautiful!

Agoda Tech Camp Day

I was invited to be a panelist for Agoda's tech camp day, where Agoda collaborated with the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration to inspire students to work in tech.

I remembered being that age where I would listen to adults in a big hall not that long ago, now I'm at the age where I tell my stories. It's fascinating how quick time files.

Thanks to the team at BMA, Agoda and fellow panelists for making this happen!

HCAP and ITCamp

On another note, I had another private talk sessions at HCAP chula right after that day.

Then another talk on design thinking at ITCamp.

I remembered there's not a lot of opportunities for students like this when I was still in middle school, coding was relatively new back then.

Elysia Research Paper

Our research paper have been accepted into the ACM's SAC conference!

As it's our first paper, I spent a crazy amount of effort to write this paper. Although the quality isn't exactly what I expected, a win is a win.

Thanks to Pub for doing a huge amount of work on the paper, and Aom for the Elysia framework. We spent quite a lot of time in my room, and also at cafes to finish the paper.

A photo behind our "very productive" moments, hmmm...

An average day of tying up JavaScript library maintainers...

Cybernetic Subinnimitr

Another secret project I've been working on almost the entirety of this year is Cybernetics Subinnimitr, a performance show that will be shown at Taipei early next year as part of the Pichet Klunchun Dance Company.

There's a lot I would love to share, but since the project hasn't been officially premiered yet, I'll not reveal too much in this blog. I'll just share some sneak-peek tidbits that are not too confidential.

I'm in charge of building the program for the dancers to interact with, where the program would generate new dance variations of the current dance moves. Here is a sneak-peek photo of an early prototype version.

Thanks to P' Pat (PP) for inviting me! Pat is honestly one of the smartest and craziest person I've ever met, in a good way. I wish I can build as cool of stuff as him.

Here's another shot of the later iterations of the program, where we added terminal-like voice interfaces (courtesy of Pat) to make it easier to use in stage environments, and accomodate more accents.

What I found most fascinating is not the program itself, but the dancers trying to mimic and re-interpret what they see and dance with them. Huge props to them for executing the impossible moves!

PS - I just realized how the projection-mapped projectors work. I didn't knew it would be this versatile! I might use something similar for Algorave

Once the performance is complete and the certain is unveiled, I'll do a write-up on how this works. It's honestly not that difficult to write, but this is my very first time working with Three.js, so there are some tricky bits.

Arts

Pub also invited me to see a couple of performance arts and installations this year. This photo is from Juggle and Hide, where they use moving objects to tell a story about relationships between authors and the symbols they choose to use.

I also saw P' Nawapol's photography at the Bangkok CityCity gallery. Certainly many interesting shots!

Talks

I also gave quite a few talks this year. One I remembered on top of my head is at Microsoft's GitHub Copilot community event, where I talked about how we should not learn new languages for the language itself, but to understand the principles behind the language author's decision to create the language, and the underlying paradigms.

Another talk is How to learn almost anything, where I gave 4 different variations of this talk at different events. I will write a blog post on this, as this is the principles I stuck with for many years and it's one of the things I can confidently share.

1080 Episodes of One Piece

I remembered I didn't have any time to rest last year - so this year feels like a compensation for that. I remembered being in a metro train, suddenly imagining One Piece being on the front page of BiliBili. Five months and around 450+ hours in later, I binged the whole show from end to end.

Reflections

That was my many memories of 2023. It seemed like a very fun and enjoyable year, but I learned quite a lot about approaching projects and managing my energy as well. Here are some of my thoughts on what happened this year.

You can't rush emergence and time.

I remembered talking to many people about my goals for the future, and what I wanted to do with my life at the start of this year.

Several months in, I realized that building a community of creative builders is different than building software, in that it relies on emergence, which relies on time. Even though we tried to "push" it to grow, at the end it is more like sprouts or saplings that needs time and care to grow.

I don't think I will abandon this goal just yet. After all, it has been on my mind for six years, and it has been the guiding principles for many projects I've done. However, I think it's better to start from what I'm curious in and draw people in from there. On that note:

Communities forms organically from content.

To be honest, I've always hated the "big crowd management" aspect of communities. Moderating communities is probably the one aspect I will never do. I generally dislike things that scale.

I prefer a smaller community of people who is creative and thinks more critically, although I wish to make information open to everyone, so that it can spread like a pollen to people that are far away from me.

On that note, I noticed that communities that forms organically around an idea, interest or curiosity around an idea or content are much more tight-knit than being event-based, and they scale better. I don't like hosting events for the sake of it, or just to boast that a lot of people joined.

That's why I don't really like corporate-hosted meetups - in many case their objectives is to "sell" the technologies, instead of talking about the fundamentals and the algorithms behind it.

Abstracting away useful fundamentals and encouraging people to only learn the tools is a really disingenuous way of building communities. A healthy community should encourage people to learn the timeless knowledge and principles and think critically, instead of always chasing after what is shiny.

This blog is not yet complete.

I think I will make a "Part 2" of the blog where I discuss the actual "reflections" and principles, but I think this blog is already long enough. I'll link the next parts here.

Goodbye, 2023!

Thank you to my friends for sticking with me in 2023. Shoutout to my soft plush friends for keeping me company throughout this year.

Goodbye, 2023.

2024, here I come! Another fun year awaits us.