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2023 year in review

Published 2023-12-31 by Seth Larson
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2023 was a great year! So much happened, but a few things in particular stood out to be when putting together this post.

I got married to my wife, Trina after 9 years of being together. We met in college and fell in love with each others' passion for adventure, food, and life. Our ceremonies included both of our cultures and we had family and friends from all over the globe together to celebrate with us.


"Vu Quy" or "tea ceremony" with family. Photo credit: Summer Street Photography

We were married near where we first met on the University of Minnesota east bank campus and the Mississippi river. The photo below is my favorite of the whole day:


Stone Arch Bridge with the Minneapolis downtown in the background. Photo credit: Summer Street Photography

I traveled to many new places this year and got to see friends everywhere I went. This was my first year traveling to New York, Florida, Texas, Rhode Island, and northern Nevada. Places I'm looking forward to exploring in 2024 include Japan, Seattle, and Pittsburgh (see you at PyCon US!)

Elastic had its first Engineering All Hands in-person since COVID to start off 2023 where I got to meet my long-time friend and colleague Quentin Pradet. Quentin and I have been working on open source together for over 5 years and this was our first opportunity to meet in person.


Quentin and I together at Elastic EAH 2023

After 3 great years at Elastic I was hired by the Python Software Foundation to be the Security Developer-in-Residence. It was a surreal feeling sitting near the front of the 2023 Python Software Foundation update and hearing that the role was "very close" to being finalized a few weeks before the public announcement was made in June. I still have days when I think I'm dreaming, I'm so grateful I have the opportunity to work full-time serving a community I love.


Banner included in OpenSSF's announcement of my hiring.

This blog saw a huge burst of activity thanks to my new position where I publish weekly reports on what I've been working on. There were 34 new publications to the blog in 2023 (up from 12 in 2022), of those 24 were related to the Security Developer-in-Residence role.

The top posts by readership for this year were:

If I had to pick a favorite post outside of this list it would be “For You” is not for me discussing my current outlook on internet consumption. Look forward to more posts on the blog, hopefully continuing the trend that I'm on of shorter but more frequent publications.

Outside of software I plan to spend more time playing games (beat Pikmin 4 and Super Mario RPG is in-progress) and learning some hardware-hacking for retro gaming like Gameboy and GameCube modding.

Hope you all had a lovely 2023, looking forward to what we can do in 2024! 🥳

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This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0