Before I forget, I wanted to reflect on a few key moments from 2023.

At the start of the year, I got married to my best friend in the entire world. Surrounded by family and friends, it turned out to be an awesome day. We were both grateful for how the wedding turned out, and it will remain to be the happiest moment of my life. I grateful to everyone who came and spent the day celebrating with us.

When I returned to work I did a lot of work migrating the Te Wāhi Learn website onto a new version of Nextra. I used the opportunity to add new content and courses onto the site, and develop new tools that could help my students make art (Robin and I did a talk about this at ASATA). I’m proud of the work we did, and of my ability to do this with my limited understanding of Javascript and web development. I’m hoping I can train myself in this area in the new year.

In July, I left my job at Takapuna Grammar School and relocated to Wellington with my wife. While it was hard to move away from my family and friends, it was exciting to move to a new place and set ourselves up from scratch. We filled our Honda Fit with all our belongings and drove to our new home, trying not to bottom out the car along state highway one.

A few months into my new job in Wellington, I picked up web analytics for the first time. While I dislike Google and their practices, I appreciated being able to learn how to use GA4 and Looker Studio to visualise analytics data. In the future, I would love to work more in this space using more privacy respecting tools such as Plausible.

We spent Christmas and New Year’s between our respective families. I got to spend a lot of time with my nieces, visiting playgrounds and parks around Auckland. Even in the few months we’ve been away they’ve grown an incredible amount.

I don’t have any New Year’s resolutions at the moment besides the typical things one wishes they can do more of. We want to spend more time travelling next year, and I want to continue learning and making new things. We are hoping later in the year we can go to Japan to see my family and friends there.