Summary of 2023, Plans for 2024

Ever since I started operating on the Internet, I haven’t written a year recap even once. So I’m starting a recurring post summarizing what has been happening with me over the last year. I’m starting with the year that has just ended: 2023.

The past year was a real rollercoaster for me! Full of challenges and very intense growth. I had to “grow up” incredibly fast as an entrepreneur. I’ll start with how the entire business called msalamon.pl developed.

msalamon.pl Store

We started January 2023 as a two-person team. Me + one person in the warehouse. We began the year in my small, modest 23-square-meter office room, which served as a warehouse with a few shelving units, my office, and a recording studio.

Already in the first quarter, I “added” another 14-square-meter room upstairs, to which I moved the office and studio. In the old room we added a few shelving units, ending up with as many as 14 🙂 In total we had a crazy 37 square meters.

All year long I worked very intensively to grow the electronics store. I can confidently say: successfully. A year later—so now, in January 2024—we’re at 170 m2 (the move happened in August), and the number of people working at msalamon has just reached 6 full-time on-site positions + 6 permanent remote people for special tasks.

In spring we’ll definitely record some kind of office tour. We’re still partially living out of moving boxes and need a bit of time.

My plan for this year is further strong growth and creating new jobs. As for the store, a customer service department will start taking shape any day now. Many of my followers—probably you too—still have the impression that I run this solo, because I’m still “on the front line” and most customers still have contact with me 🙂

We’re constantly adding new products and new product categories. One big category that wouldn’t let me rest was soldering and… finally, the basic tools and accessories in this area are available. Check it out here: >SOLDERING<.

Educational activity

Because I had to focus very strongly on the store, unfortunately it had to affect my educational activity 🙁 In the second half of the year I started producing videos on YouTube. The series “STM32 on Registers” was created, and it currently contains 6 episodes.

The move to the new location broke the consistency, which I still can’t get back to today. I already have materials prepared for the next ones. I “just” need to sit down, record, and edit, and that should happen in the first quarter of 2024 🙂 There will be another 6–7 episodes in this series, and then we’ll see what’s next.

Only 3 blog posts appeared, literally, and they are the written form of YouTube videos. I’m not very proud of that, but I don’t know how much it will change in 2024.

As for online courses, there were two openings of the STM32 Course for Beginners (the content is conducted in Polish), during which you could also join my other courses: FreeRTOS on STM32 for Beginners (the content is conducted in Polish) and C Language for Microcontrollers (the content is conducted in Polish).

I had a plan for a new course at the end of 2023, but the store’s growth pace knocked me flat. Right now, after an intense round of hiring, I feel like I’m getting closer and closer to starting work on a new course. Who knows… maybe even in the first quarter of 2024 I’ll share concrete information about what course it is and in what form. I’m sure many readers, as well as current students, can already guess 🙂

In the courses category we also have plans for a small rebuild of the platform and producing a few much smaller courses. Perhaps with other instructors than me? Who knows.

Collaborations with other creators

When I was feeling sorry for myself that I didn’t have time to create content, I decided to support other creators making interesting materials. I really like that they do it in a different style than I do.

First, we started collaborating with https://inthou.pl/, i.e., with Mateusz and Dominik. They write very precise articles with an engineering approach. They also tackle topics where I don’t feel the strongest. They also combine electronics itself and its design with STM32 programming. If you haven’t come across them yet, I highly recommend them!

Articles that came out of our collaboration:

• PWM Controller – #9 – PIR Sensor – principle of operation, connection, and handling in the program
• FFT Calculation on an STM32 Microcontroller – #1 – CMSIS Library, spectral leakage, windows used for FFT, implementation in a project
• FFT Calculation on an STM32 Microcontroller – #2 – Program performing FFT, results presentation, spectral leakage and its causes
• FFT Calculation on an STM32 Microcontroller – #3 – Measurement of three waveforms using independent analog-to-digital converters with DMA and Combined regular simultaneous + alternate trigger mode for accurate phase shift measurement on the STM32F103 processor
• Mini Project – #1 – How to create simple automation in Selenium and integrate it with electronics?

The second creator I support and strongly root for is Adam, who runs a YouTube channel called ELEKTRON. An amazing guy who loves to take devices apart and program all the microcontrollers he finds inside them. On top of that—in assembly, which he probably loves and I hate 🙂 I have a great time watching his videos, so I highly recommend it!

I’d like to expand my collaboration portfolio in 2024, so if you’re regularly active in electronics on the Internet, you can reach out to me. If it’s interesting for me and for the audience, we’ll talk about support.

Health

This is a bit outside the topic of my Internet activity, but maybe I’ll inspire you, so I decided to write about it.

The end of 2022 and all of 2023 really took a toll on me! Up to that point, I worked an enormous number of hours, moved little, and ate terribly. For several years now I’ve been noticing more and more the impact of how I take care of myself on how I feel and how effective I am. It’s not that age anymore, he he.

I’m heading toward working less, but much more effectively. In 2023 I started limiting work and right now I manage to work relatively little, meaning 8–10 hours a day. Starting this year, I definitively stopped working on weekends (well… with small exceptions, which I’m still working on).

I travel a lot during the year on vacation. Every trip gives me an incredible boost. Very good ideas come during that time—ideas that would never come to me during desk-bound marathons of grinding myself down.

As a way to mentally escape from work, I really allowed myself to play games. I bought a PS5 and I play hard without guilt that “I could have been working during that time.” It works really well!

Of course, there are times when you have to put in extra hours, like during a course campaign or producing a new course. These are basically unavoidable things and I take that into account. I try to minimize how often they happen. That’s also why fewer materials from me were created, but thanks to that I didn’t end up on the couch 🙂

Unchanged for years, the biggest impact on my well-being and productivity comes from 3 things:

• Good and effective sleep
• Sport
• Proper diet

When one of these is lacking, things start going bad. I instantly feel awful, everything hurts, and my weight goes up. I started implementing improvements in 2022 and throughout 2023, by taking good care of these 3 aspects, I achieved striking results.

Weight is quite a good indicator of results, but for the first time in my life I focused on living healthily, not on forcing myself to lose as many kilograms as possible. Without pressure, without counting calories and other weird regime and guilt trips. As a result, over 2 years I lost 10 kg, which you can probably see on YouTube when comparing old videos to current ones.

I wanted to write here about what I do in each of these three pillars and I wrote it, but… I deleted it. This is an electronics blog, not a health blog 🙂 Maybe one day I’ll talk about it if there’s interest.

Summary

A lot happened in 2023. Sometimes I feel like I lived 3 years in one year 😅 I have many more plans than what I wrote here. Not all of them are public, but their effects should be visible in how the msalamon.pl company operates and what we’ll be releasing together as a team.

I’m sure that 2024 will bring just as much good! I wish the same to you, so that in this new year you achieve everything you plan. See you in a year for the 2024 recap 🙂 Good luck!