2023 - A Tech Year in Review

  • 10th Dec 2023
  • 8 min read
  • Tags: 
  • 2023

2023 gave me the ability to experience a lot of different tools, languages, and technologies, many did not make the cut long-term but I would like to put together a list of the core tooling that I use day to day with an example or two along the way.

CLI

This section involves tools that I use on the CLI on any given day. Mostly everything that I talk about will be available with my settings/install instructions in my dotfiles.

This will also apply to the neovim section as well.

Shell

This sections is strictly about tools that I am calling from zsh. Mostly everything discussed here will be available for bash and whatever other shell you use.

Age & SOPS

One of the best revelations for me this year has been that I am able to finally get rid of GPG by replacing it with SSH and with Age. For the SSH level signing please read this post.

Age is a fast and cryptographically secure encryption library that can be used as a replacement for asymmetric encryption of secrets and files. It follows a similar pattern to GPG but the commands are fewer, defaults are secure, and the subcommands make sense. This example below is taken from the project's README.

$ age-keygen -o key.txt
Public key: age1ql3z7hjy54pw3hyww5ayyfg7zqgvc7w3j2elw8zmrj2kg5sfn9aqmcac8p
$ tar cvz ~/data | age -r age1ql3z7hjy54pw3hyww5ayyfg7zqgvc7w3j2elw8zmrj2kg5sfn9aqmcac8p > data.tar.gz.age
$ age --decrypt -i key.txt data.tar.gz.age > data.tar.gz

You'll see a private key on the homepage of this site that you can use to send secrets (I can't think what you'd possibly send). But the principal is the same in that you simply can share your public key and people can encrypt files to you, or... you can store secrets to yourself in your dotfiles - like I have for saving my OpenAI api token - and simply decrypt it when using it Neovim with chatgpt.nvim by decrypting it by using my plugin (age.nvim)

The best part however, is to get everyone on your team to generate one and use for with SOPS to manage project secrets. You can use this in conjunction with cloud keys like Vault, KMS, etc... so your dev, staging and prod environments can be managed strictly with the KMS key to encrypt and decrypt, while your local environment (or even dev) has secrets easily available to the team. Just set up another age key pair for GitHub in it's secrets section and add it as a recipient to your env files. --add-age <GITHUB-Age-Identity.txt> so all your Actions can decrypt whatever you need too. I've used this successfully across projects.

The Old Boys

This section is a list of tools I have been using for years and have no plans on stopping. I use these every day.

  • Bat - Cat replacement with syntax highlighting written in 🦀
  • Eza - A modern, maintained replacement for ls
  • Fd - A rust find replacement with a simpler syntax
  • Fzf - Command line fuzzy finder. It also let's you fuzzy find files <ctrl+t>, change directories <Alt+c>, and most useful, searching your command history interactively for that one git command you can't remember <ctrl+r>.
  • Starship - Useful shell theme for tooling and environment settings
  • LazyGit - Git some superpowers 🐐
  • Ripgrep - 🦀 grep replacement.
  • Zoxide - Super fast cd with a memory. Instead of typing cd dir1/client1/project1/submodule1 after you've done it once, you can then just type z d1c1s1 and it will take you there.

Mise

Mise is an asdf replacement written in, you guessed it 🦀 that allows you to install and manage multiple versions of your project. Let's say a repo needs python 3.12, terraform 1.6, and go 1.21 and you need to make sure that your aws cli runs in eu-west-2 it might be daunting getting all those tools, making sure you're using that tool in this project and don't break other projects using different versions of the same languages. It's as simple as...

mise p install python terraform go
mise install [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
mise use [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

This will make a file in your project called .mise.toml

Open that up and you'll see...

[tools]
python = "3.12"
terraform = "1.6"
go = "1.21"

## Let's make sure we are deploying in the same region and profile
[env]
AWS_PROFILE="profile_name"
AWS_REGION="eu-west-2"

Save and close, and run mise trust. And now you will see that those two environment variables have been set and your tools will be the versions that you have specified in this file.

Neovim

For people who use neovim, this section might be of interest to you but if not feel free to skip ahead. Here is a list of plugins that I use. These are all on GitHub so just search for them. I will add a tiny note over ones that are slightly more niche.

○ ChatGPT.nvim
○ LuaSnip
○ age.nvim
○ cmp-buffer
○ cmp-cmdline
○ cmp-nvim-lsp
○ cmp-path
○ cmp_luasnip
○ conform.nvim
○ diffview.nvim
○ friendly-snippets
○ gitsigns.nvim
○ harpoon
○ leap.nvim
○ mason-lspconfig.nvim
○ mason.nvim
○ mini.trailspace
○ nui.nvim
○ nvim-cmp
○ nvim-dap
○ nvim-dap-python
○ nvim-dap-ui
○ nvim-dap-virtual-text
○ nvim-lspconfig
○ nvim-nio
○ nvim-spectre
○ nvim-treesitter
○ nvim-treesitter-context
○ nvim-treesitter-refactor
○ nvim-treesitter-textobjects
○ oil.nvim
○ telescope-fzf-native.nvim
○ telescope-ui-select.nvim
○ telescope.nvim
○ todo-comments.nvim
○ undotree
○ vim-dadbod
○ vim-dadbod-completion
○ vim-dadbod-ui
● alpha-nvim
● catppuccin
● lazy.nvim
● lualine.nvim
● nvim-lint
● nvim-surround
● nvim-web-devicons
● plenary.nvim
● toggleterm.nvim
● ts-comments.nvim
● which-key.nvim

Colour Themes

Very quickly on colour themes. I have tried many colour schemes over the years, if you can name it, I have probably tried it. I have settled on catppuccin due to its availability across many tools and software. I will list my top 5 so if you hate it, you can look at some others instead.

  1. Catppuccin
  2. Gruvbox
  3. Rose Pine
  4. Tokyo Night
  5. Everforest

Programming

Frameworks

Python

FastAPI - with the inclusion of pydantic 2.0 has been really great to build API's in. I don't particularly like JS/TS frameworks so using FastAPI + Jinja to template out API first websites with automatically generated redoc and openapi.json. Here come the haters to say that I am ten years behind the time and you need interactivity and fancy animations. Guess what? Animations just use some css or animated svgs. And for just updating parts of a page there is a simpler way... htmx. All the interactivity you need without needing to manage two projects. Use your templates and stick some htmx attributes on your html and you can update those live status icons without needing to write any javascript.

I'd like to try the same pattern with Go or Rust as the backend and htmx and html with the front-end. I am a simple man who likes simple tools and simple maintainable solutions. JS and TS frameworks have their place, but that's not my area of work.

Elixir

This philosophy extends even further than the htmx reactivity when it comes to resiliance and efficiency of data being transferred over websockets with the minimal payload required with the beauty that is Phoenix Liveview. I am anxiously awaiting a long running project that will allow me to take my learnings from private testing to full blown projects. Changes of objects are passed simply over the websocket with the minimal amount of info required to update. So while htmx or a JS request needs to send your API token, header, cookies and minimal data response, with Phoenix, if we change a row in a 50 column 100 row table from yes -> no the resulting network traffic looks similar to.

{1: "no"}

Which is... 11 whole bytes!

echo '{1: "no"} ' | wc
    1       2      11

Oh yeah...and tailwind.css comes pre-bundled so you can even avoid the css if you want 😉.

Packages/Tools

DuckDB

DuckDB is a really great tool that has replaced my need to use jq for cutting down big json files and has let me also search and filter csvs from the command line with nearly no issues. Not only is it a performant local database, but it can also read, query and write json, csv and parquet files.

Here are some examples:

Reading csv from the command line:

 ❯ titanic="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/datasciencedojo/datasets/master/titanic.csv"
 ❯ duckdb -c "select Pclass, Survived, PassengerId  from read_csv_auto('$titanic') where Fare <= 15 limit 10"

┌────────┬──────────┬─────────────┐
│ Pclass │ Survived │ PassengerId │
│ int64  │  int64   │    int64    │
├────────┼──────────┼─────────────┤
│      3 │        0 │           1 │
│      3 │        1 │           3 │
│      3 │        0 │           5 │
│      3 │        0 │           6 │
│      3 │        1 │           9 │
│      3 │        0 │          13 │
│      3 │        0 │          15 │
│      2 │        1 │          18 │
│      3 │        1 │          20 │
│      2 │        1 │          22 │
├────────┴──────────┴─────────────┤
│ 10 rows               3 columns │
└─────────────────────────────────┘

From json:

❯ iris="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/domoritz/maps/master/data/iris.json"
❯ duckdb -c "from read_json_auto('$iris') where sepalWidth <= 3 limit 10"

┌─────────────┬────────────┬─────────────┬────────────┬────────────┐
│ sepalLength │ sepalWidth │ petalLength │ petalWidth │  species   │
│   double    │   double   │   double    │   double   │  varchar   │
├─────────────┼────────────┼─────────────┼────────────┼────────────┤
│         4.9 │        3.0 │         1.4 │        0.2 │ setosa     │
│         4.4 │        2.9 │         1.4 │        0.2 │ setosa     │
│         4.8 │        3.0 │         1.4 │        0.1 │ setosa     │
│         4.3 │        3.0 │         1.1 │        0.1 │ setosa     │
│         5.0 │        3.0 │         1.6 │        0.2 │ setosa     │
│         4.4 │        3.0 │         1.3 │        0.2 │ setosa     │
│         4.5 │        2.3 │         1.3 │        0.3 │ setosa     │
│         4.8 │        3.0 │         1.4 │        0.3 │ setosa     │
│         5.5 │        2.3 │         4.0 │        1.3 │ versicolor │
│         6.5 │        2.8 │         4.6 │        1.5 │ versicolor │
├─────────────┴────────────┴─────────────┴────────────┴────────────┤
│ 10 rows                                                5 columns │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Formatters

Other languages tend to have built-in formatters or I don't use those languages so sorry. The main point is... in python land I no longer need Flake8, Black or iSort. And in JS land, biome has replaced prettier and eslint for me.

Grab Bag

This is just a grab bag of favourites I want to use as a point of reflection on where my life was at the moment. Some of these things are old, they are just things that I hadn't experienced until this year and would recommend them.

Some Favourites of the Year

Movies

  • The Act of Killing
  • Dark Waters
  • The VVitch

TV

  • Band of Brothers
  • Jujustu Kaisen
  • Succession

Books

  • The Road - Cormac McCarthy
  • The Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
  • The Ministry for Future - Kim Stanley Robinson

Video Games

  • The Outer Wilds - Echoes of the Eye
  • Metroid Dread
  • The Legend of Zelda - Tears of the Kingdom