2023 in review - Samuel Pitonak (@sampittko)

I had been busy with my Bujo yearly reflection for the past month or so. It took me 10 hours in total to complete. It is a summary of quartile summaries and a first attempt to approach a yearly review article in a more structured way. In front of me, there lays a list of highlights from 2023 - top wins and challenges in my life. Let’s take a deeper dive into the most significant events of the past year.

The following quote summarizes the year very precisely for me:

A vision without a task is but a dream, a task without a vision is but a drudgery, a vision and a task is the hope of the world. — David Allen

The biggest challenge for me in 2023 was to break down my vision into a concrete set of the very next actions. It was a challenge of continuing to dream about the future while doing the real work now in direction of the world I envisioned.

Sustainable UI

You could learn from my 2022 in review article that at the beginning of this year, I had begun to get involved full-time in Sustainable UI (SUI) open-source project of mine - project awarded as The Most Innovative at Carbon Hack 22. I gave up on my regular income to follow my passion for enabling others to create websites that are aligned with people and planet.

Passion mindset

I bet you felt not only a tiny bit of enthusiasm from the above paragraph. Some would even say blindfoldedness which is the way I prefer to call my past attitude today. On one hand, I had a fairly large runway to afford not working at least for the next 6 months, on the other it created a pressure that stood in my way of execution. Today, the decision back then does not make much sense to me anymore when I look at it with a 12-months difference.

Can you imagine the amount of work I managed to do in 2 months time (till the end of February) in such a situation? Plans were to finish with implementation of the headless React library (sui-headless-react) and expand the ecosystem of open-source SUI headless libraries that switch UI components based on grid carbon intensity and user input.

Burnout

The reality is that I burned out after creating the official SUI documentation website. I wasn't able to finish the library implementation and make it available to a broader developer community. I was a great dreamer but a bad software developer at that time. Before making my decision to "do my own thing" right after winning the hackathon, I thought that I am a superman.

Success is like a drug, opposite of failure. — Steven Pressfield

I took that drug when I won the hackathon. I thought it gave me superpowers, that I am more capable than others. I have the ambition so why not risk it? I am a young man that can take risks. So I took it and failed hard. In the beginning of March, I was completely burned out, falling back to reading books about entrepreneurship and personal development. I registered on labor office to become officially unemployed, with an intention to recover in the coming month and find a job.

SUI Builder

There is something more hidden under the above sentences that I want to talk about to give you a bigger picture understanding. This whole time since the beginning of the year, I was thinking about how to use SUI to make profit as I was without an income. I was asking about how to have the biggest positive impact on the global web.

Instantly, it became obvious that I want to allow anyone to create a sustainable website, not only programmers whom I provide SUI libraries for free, as a gift to the open web ecosystem. The idea was to create a no-code website builder using SUI open-source technology. I've asked more experience software developers I know to voice their opinions and I received not a single hesitant response but a handful of them. Nonetheless, I did not get discouraged and dreamed forward.

Communities, professional network and opportunities

Before I continue in the timeline, let me take a pause and talk about something important I continually observe in my life. I cannot stress enough how significant are communities and networking in my professional life. I wouldn't do what I do now without the two. Let me tell you about a series of events that unfolded in my life to give you a proof:

October 2021 - I joined ClimateAction.Tech (CAT) community to get to know more like-minded individuals who want to innovate todays tech space in an eco-friendly manner.
May 2022 - Inspiration from web and design channels in the CAT community had helped me evolve and further develop my own thinking about web UIs and sustainability, ultimately becoming more and more interested in the topic.
August 2022 - I read a blog post via CAT regarding Green Mode Design principles that convinced me I am not alone who thinks the way I think about UIs in general and a "less is more" approach.
September 2022 - I won The Most Innovative Award at Carbon Hack 22 with SUI that was the first project that implements aforementioned Green Mode Design principles in practice and also makes UIs carbon aware. I also joined Adora Foundation Incubation Lab that had helped me accelerate the project after the hackathon.
December 2022 - I presented the topic of Carbon Aware UIs to the local Tatry IT community to spread awareness about an emerging topic in the field.
January 2023 - I took a leap of faith and made SUI my full-time endeavor. Later on, I joined forces with Albert Fourage who I knew via CAT and who learned about me taking SUI seriously via my LinkedIn post.
August 2023 - Got a sustainability-oriented job from Ismael, author of the Green Mode Design principles blog article above and also now my mentor and a colleague. At the same time, working on edi with Albert, more on which below.
December 2023 - Attended a panel discussion by Adora Foundation as part of their COP28 panel series, where the topic of discussion were the Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG), with their co-chair and editor Tim Frick.

What I've realized by acknowledging this sequence of events is that communities and professional network can mean everything for having a career that gives joy, and also can open new directions previously unimaginable.

Sense of direction

Unifying mission to your working life can be a source of great satisfaction. — Cal Newport

How to find communities and build network? Find a unifying mission that directs your attention in the distracted world. You can work on anything you want but the most important is to have a sense of direction. You cannot be everywhere so choose wisely and then join communities to get surprised again and again. What could be the most interesting is to merge 2 or 3 areas of your interest to build a totally unique identity.

edi

So now let's get back to the timeline sequence of the most important events of 2023. What had happened after my burnout while working on SUI? In addition to lots and lots of personal development, it was mainly shaping the idea of SUI Builder together with my co-founder Albert who specializes in UI/UX design.

EIT Digital Venture Program

I partnered with Albert to join the European accelerator programme for early-stage startups in May. We were selected as the only project from Slovakia, attending the programme together with 2 Czech and 3 Polish projects, if I recall correctly. Thanks to the programme, we received valuable knowledge and resources for entrepreneurship from experienced mentors, investors and entrepreneurs across Europe.

As an MVP, we created an official edi website with sustainable elements, most notably low-mode switch at the top-right corner that degrades the user experience. It saves energy resources required to render the website on the user PC. This was far from no-code but it conveyed the message very well to the broader public. The website serves to us as a great medium for communicating our vision, till this day.

Reframing

During the programme, we realized our idea is valid but overly ambitious for a small team like us. At the same time, we decided we want to grow rather sustainably and organically than via 3rd-party investments. We decided to start small and slow, which is more aligned with our sustainable mindset and edi brand in general.

This required us to rething technology behind the no-code platform and also narrow the definition of value that we will want to be providing in the future to our potential customers. The programme has helped me to go from a pure dreamer to a dreamer and a doer. For what this year was, this sounds like a big-enough reward to me. Nowadays, I actually write lines of code, something I was supposed to be doing from the start of the year.

So once again, I put the following quote down:

A vision without a task is but a dream, a task without a vision is but a drudgery, a vision and a task is the hope of the world. — David Allen

Books

I could have given up already. But the vision remains the same as it was in May 2022, just the conrete steps were made much more clear this year thanks to variety of challenges I faced, mostly together with Albert. This made us much more resilient and focused. I attribute the source of my courage and endurance mostly to knowledge I've gathered from books I've read this year. This was also the year I read the biggest amount of books in my life.

Read

The 3 Alarms: A Simple System to Transform Your Health, Wealth, and Relationships Forever (link)
Jsi značka?! (link)
Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (link)
The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future (link)
Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI (link)
Nevyžádané rady mládeži (link)
So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love (link)
The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life (link)
Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad (link)
Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered (link)
Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative (link)
The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness (link)
Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life (link)
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity (link)
How to Live: 27 conflicting answers and one weird conclusion (link)
Hell Yeah or No: what’s worth doing (link)
The War of Art (link)
Turning Pro (link)
Your Music and People: creative and considerate fame (link)
The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You (link)
The CBT Workbook for Perfectionism: Evidence-Based Skills to Help You Let Go of Self-Criticism, Build Self-Esteem, and Find Balance (link)

In the process of reading

The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age (link)
How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success from the World’s Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs (link)
Elon Musk (link)
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (link)
Speed Reading: Learn to Read a 200+ Page Book in 1 Hour (Mental Performance) (link)
A Promised Land (link)

2024

My aim for the next year is to keep a sustainable balance between work on edi and work on projects that represent my main income stream. I want these projects to be aligned with my vision to fit well into the bigger picture of my professional life. Current work at EarthShift Global is very exciting and I am hoping our partnership can evolve significantly in a positive direction during the coming months.

Let me end with a phrase that testifies itself as true in my life repeatedly:

Stick to it for a while, even if it hurts you a little. - Samuel Pitonak

And also something on mission from Yan Zoritchak, world-renowned artist and cousin of my father:

You go forward, angelic signs, you create even without a response, but you look at your mission and it gives you meaning. - Yan Zoritchak