Mistakes were made - 2022 edition
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.
- Lab and projects
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.