A year ago I wrote an article about my Knowledge Portfolio in 2022. Indeed, knowledge is an investment, but I changed my mind about diversifying it. At the time, I described the domains, the programming languages, and the projects I planned to spend time with. To this day, some of them flourished and others failed. Since time is a valuable asset, spending it with a limited set of subjects will lead to mastery sooner. I’m trying to downsize this year, so let’s talk about what happened in 2022 and what to expect in 2023.

I was a Ph.D candidate in 2009, in the Electrical Engineering department, at Université catholique de Louvain. A coleague of mine, Russian, told me about this conference in Saint Petersburg and asked me if I wanted to submit a paper. I agreed, we wrote it together and it got accepted. Since she was in Moscow at the time, I thought she would present the paper, but our lab had a policy that they could only pay for trips from Belgium to Russia, not from Russia to Russia. So, I had to go.

I’m over a year working in the healthcare industry. Before that, I was involved in education and finance. These are industries with significant impact on people’s lives, but the impact of healthcare is far more important because we may be poor or poorly educated, but being poorly healthy is a life threatening situation. A bug in an education system is upsetting, but it can be fixed without major impact. A bug in a financial system is troublesome to many people but they all have a chance to recover with the help of government and insurance companies. In a healthcare system, a bug can kill people. Loosing a simple allergy reaction record can represent severe complications during a surgery, for example.

The City of Waterloo, located in Ontario - Canada, has an Open Data Portal that publishes raw data about infrastructure, services, environment, transportation, etc. Residents can use the data to oversee public investments and services, identify gaps, discover development opportunities, and even create new business. We figured out another use for the Portal: test CSVSource. It publishes a variety of CSV files. Among them, we found a an inventory of every single tree planted on the streets of Waterloo. Isn’t it cool?!