I’m hoping this is going to be a short and sweet post. It’s going to consist of the highlights of the year as I can think of them. It has been a whirlwind time for me and I’ve had an exciting 12 months.

I am your Father

I get to say that now! Our baby boy is doing really well and my spouse is starting to think of what working is going to entail for her. She’s been an absolute champion and I can not express how amazing she has done in her new role as a mother. It has been stressful, but nothing that we weren’t able to overcome. I’m looking forward to building many more memories with my family!

Sim Racing

The year has been somewhat “quiet” in some aspects while it has been super exciting. I sprung for an iRacing subscription in December 2022 and intended to get my money’s worth. My racing participation at Sim Race South Africa has dwindled down by a lot, but I’m still active in the community and doing my best to make sure things stay sustainable so that we can have a good local space to race.

I’ve been picking up some more racing in the general iRacing series, mostly because it’s something I can hop onto after 21:00 when my wife and son have gone to bed. It’s been liberating getting some good racing action in and I’m probably going to be leveraging the ability to race in the evenings a little bit more.

Endurance Racing

The year mostly consisted of big endurance racing events:

• iRacing VCO Daytona 24 (Start P12, Finish P7)
• iRacing VCO Sebring 12 (Start P10, DNF)
• iRacing Nurburgring 24 (Start P46 - P6 in Class, Finish P19 - P1 in class)
• iRacing VCO Watkins Glen 6HR (Start P13, Finish P7)

It was the first time I competed in a 24 hour event this year. The Daytona 24 I raced as a guest of a local team, while for the Nurburgring 24 I raced with 2 other members from my own team. It was a grueling race, but taking P1 in class was an amazing experience. I was sad about the Sebring 12 hour’s DNF, but we were so badly prepared that it perhaps was a blessing in disguise. The Watkins Glen 6 HR was great fun as well. We were doing extremely well, basically on for a podium finish but had to pit for some damage that set us back. Finishing better than our start was a big plus.

SRSA

I reduced the amount of racing I can do on a weekly basis by quite a bit, only competing in one of the three available series each season hosts. For the 2023.1 season I raced in the GT3 series an for the 2023.2 season I raced in the GT4 series. My performance was about as expected and the reality is that racing @ 20:00 on a Monday night isn’t as easy as it used to be the last few months.

Professional

What I do on a day-to-day basis has changed quite a lot. I was promoted to Tech Lead at Entelect in January 2022, shortly before moving off the last client project I worked on. Since April 2022 my focus has been shifted to our internal Learning & Development team where I very much found myself being a “fixer and a doer”. Whatever seemed most pressing was what I’d pick up, but slowly I’ve found my feet and better solidified what I’m doing. The bulk of my focus is on our Graduate Boot Camp, which saw over a 100 graduates kick-start their career with us this year! We also have other internal programs that spun up this year and will be getting some further refinement attention in the coming months. It does mean that I’m not spending time day-to-day writing code anymore, but I honestly don’t miss it enough to want to go back to working on projects. Training has always held a special place in my heart and I’m lucky to be involved with our team.¹

2024?

I’ll speculate on what I’m hoping to achieve in a follow-up post. Part of what I want to do is to write more regularly. I’ve created a space to dump some thoughts and inspiration for ideas and will pull from that list when I’m feeling inspired.