We’re starting a new ritual to celebrate the year gone by. You’re reading the 2022 edition.

Scorecard

• Reading: 8 papers, 6 books (goal: 22 books).
• Writing: 5 posts (goal: 12 posts).
• Work: multiple experiments and adventures.
  • Completed the platform scale project. Moved back to app development.
  • Fixed innerloop/engineering for the team. Embraced monorepo, npm workspaces, jest, axe and a11y, contribution guides and design docs in repo. Created a craftsmanship culture.
  • Tried a large x-org collaboration. 6 months collab and 6 months development.
  • Try the manager role. Checked.
  • Wrote a lot of code as a manager. I know; this one justifies the title of this post in case you were wondering ;)
• Home: great clarity on processes and tools. I think almost nirvana there.
  • Lab and projects
    • Back to Arch Linux. Other OS was too limiting.
    • Shutdown my old laptop based home server. Moved to ODroid M1. Saved a ton of energy usage for 24/7 selfhosted services.
    • Jailbreak and moved Kindle into permanent flight mode. Upgrade software to KOReader. Zotero for papers is nice.
    • Started writing handwritten digital notes with Deco Mini v7 tablet and Xournal++. Loving the effects so far.
    • Two new software releases: noted and mm.
  • Body and mind
    • Daily journal: 48 weeks. Wrote gratitude journal for last quarter on/off.
    • Started walking and swimming but couldn’t persist beyond a month.
    • Mind vs me: I fought hard, mind won.
    • Philosophy: bunch of theory, less practice. Discovered new podcasts.
    • High consumption of info and low sharing.

Lessons learned

• This year was a lot of activity at Work. Looking back, I probably focused more on the how than the what. It did help raise the bar, but may be the cost was too high.
• Technical debt is a choice. Tension between shipping value and crafting great software is real. Most of us err to former. I tried to achieve both and burnt.
• Learn to say no. I heavily biased towards action and our team shipped pioneered change. Again, the cost was too high. Never take on work without an appropriate level of funding.
• Leadership is not a one size fits all mantra. I failed miserably doing this, applied same principles to everyone. Got lucky to save the day. Leaving the year with little more emotional maturity.
• Shipped a bug fix several years late. Customers had assumed the bug to be a feature. Broke the world. Again, got lucky being part of a great team. Consistency matters more than correctness sometimes.
• Few times I let a broken window stay around. Team suffered.
• I felt uncertain and questioned judgment several times. I think the ones where I persisted turned out well. Will know this year. Always ask for data when in doubt.
• Our toddler is more rational and calm than me. Several times I got angry because I didn’t understand his motive. Maybe humans are rational in the beginning until parenting happens.
• Even after shunning external news, selfhosting and carefully curating what I read, I consumed tons of irrelevant noise. Found myself guilty of mindlessly swiping news from the orange site. More books, more notes and lesser articles.
• All of us know the truth. We hear the truth and rejoice in the congruency. And most of us still make the mistakes. Sticking to the truth is extremely hard; especially in those moments where you think the world is unfair. This year, I must practice.

Year ahead

• Reading: 23 books, 23 papers.
• Writing: 23 posts.
• Work: 5 experiments.
• Home:
  • Lab and projects: 5 experiments with 2 AI/ML efforts.
  • Body and mind:
    • Journal: weekly. Gratitude daily.
    • Walk: 2/week. Swim: 1/week.
    • Philosophy: practice 3/week.