NOTE

Am I a tech nerd who blogs about technical stuff? YES!

But do I have a life? yes. This post is not technical, and I will only continue writing this format when I feel like it.

Scroll down if you wish.

A long time ago…

When I was 11 or 12 or so (back in 6th grade), I had one of the most amazing math teachers ever. She was great at her job, but most importantly, every time the class and her had an interaction everybody would burst out in happy laughter; there was never one negative moment in that room.

We talked about birthdays and such, and the term “Sweet 16” popped up somewhere. While we were laughing hysterically from something mentoned previously, I nicely tried to ask (I was very awkward at the time and was not as social as now), I asked what it was. Turns out that…it’s just a special birthday…for some reason?

People get insane things (rich people, of course), like cars (why the hell), phones (you only need one when LineageOS stops supporting it, M*cBook Pro Max Ultra Extras or whatever that costs 6 grand…whatever. And I was told that everyone throws massive parties on that day, as if they were turning 18 or something.

To this day I still do not understand the appeal of calling this birthday so special. It doesn’t grant you any more rights in the eyes of most western/western-influenced/sane governments (you must wait till 18 for an actually important birthday), and I also do not understand why it is such a major event for so many people. Lavish parties, crazy celebrations, but what for?

What’s so sweet about 16?

Achievements

I’d like to reminisce over the things I was able to pull off in the past year.

  1. Completely unrelated, but my age is now 0b1000, it no longer fits in a 4 byte register.
  2. I won second place in a hackathon, doing web development (something I never do) in a toolkit i have never touched previously (Vue).
  3. I got very good at C, and convinced a good amount of my friends to either look into C or to learn C. I have made many projects in the language, one is in the works, namely askthing.
  4. I taught C at school in the form of a club. 2 of my “students” are now programming in C for fun and enjoying it.
  5. I also taught Python at school, 19 students fully understood my course and I am now able to teach them more complex topics this school semester :)
  6. I wrote a grand total of 3 IGCSE comp sci guides (find them under the revision tab of my site), the Pseudocode Reference, the G1 Semester 2 guide I wrote last may, and the G2 semester 1 guide that I wrote this year, along with an abridged version with G1.
  7. My ThinkPad addiction began in february. I bought way too many ThinkPads. Ended up corebooting all of them, learning BIOS programming was very fun.
  8. whatever this is.
  9. I learned and actually got pretty good at the zig programming language. Although my skills have gotten rusty :(
  10. I can confidently write a lexer for literally anything, although I still have to learn how to do recursive-descent parsing properly. Stay tuned.
  11. I made so many friends :) They are all supportive, and are very sweet people (maybe not why 16 is sweet). I found community in the computer nerd group at my school, and in the Minecraft community I am in (Sitaku); I am relied on to build core infrastructure in our humongous city/nation.
  12. I made some other silly projects, like tpfanctl to control ThinkPad fan speeds.
  13. Got better at raylib.
  14. Got better grades in school, slightly.
  15. Other stuff. I can’t remember, for me these achievements make me happy enough.

Thank you for reading this post, this blog site actually expanding also makes me very happy. Thank you, all my readers and my supporters (there are a few that I am aware of), I wish you have a wonderful day.