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⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-05)
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I've just read Will Larson's [year in review post], which has spurred me to write my own. I'm hoping it will serve as a moment to think about the things that have happened in my life, and set some positive intentions for the coming year.
My personal life is most likely where I've experienced the most growth this year.
Early in the year, I had a back injury which made movement quite difficult. A bit of surgery later and I feel much better. Through that time, my wife took on additional work with the kid because I was physically unable. While physical therapy helped a bit in the recovery, I still need to get more movement in my days. I'm making small amounts of progress on this. Further than there, there were other medical issues which made life a little more difficult than past years.
Through conversations with my wife about the lopsided workload, I've come to better appreciate how difficult things are/were for her as the stay-at-home parent dealing with the kid all day. We started therapy and this was a major topic of focus. Our therapist is pretty great and has what feel like useful tools for us to talk about things. Having an outside impression is /so/ helpful. It only takes one "I'm sure you don't mean it this way, but you kinda sound like a dick." (paraphrased) to really get you to introspect.
My wife has been doing such great work with our kid, it's really been something to see. I've really appreciated having her as a model of how to be a really great parent to our kid. The kid, has also been amazing. It's so fun to watch her grow up and do things.
One of the biggest things I underestimated the impact of, regarding the kid, was the amount of free time I have. There are a large number of things that I'd like to work on for personal enrichment, and it's difficult to not view time spent with the kid as taking away from that. It's a growth area for me at the moment.
My hobbies have taken a bit of a back burner this year with my medical issues and the pull of childcare. That said, I've managed to build a base to the tabletop I built a few years back. It's welded from steel and I was able to get it nearly done in ~5 hours, which feels great.
I've taken up video gaming, which was a wonderful release when my back was aching. It's not serving me particularly well at the moment, but is a nice way to unwind on evenings where I'm not physically up for much.
Lastly, I've been moving more and more of my workflow to Emacs. It's super nerdy, but I currently have blog posting, email, RSS reading, and gemini browsing all done via Emacs and I'm fairly happy with the result. The biggest missing piece at the moment is separating my work-life from my home-life, as the configs are intermixed.
Professionally, this has been a banner year for me. I'm currently leading a team that will deliver a software platform that supports millions of requests a day and will be a critical piece of infrastructure within the company. I've been involved from the decision making process of which technology to use (a large decision with many stakeholders) through the implementation. I'm quite excited about the work my group is doing.
Beyond that, I've been involved in some strategic discussions including hiring practices and critical metrics we want to track on an ongoing basis to ensure the stability of the business.
In the coming year, I hope to be more generative in my hobbies (writing, building, crafting) and less consumptive (video games, scrolling), though reading and occasional shows with my wife are still on the list of consumptive habits I'm excited about.
I hope to take better care of my body (regular sleep, movement and exposure to sunshine). I'm not excited about another back surgery, and this is the only way to avoid that.
I want to deepen my relationship with my wife and show up for my kid in meaningful ways.
I would like to find a way to regularly contribute to a cause in a way other than financially. Ideally this would be technical contribution, but I'm open to it being in some other form.
I would like to learn Rust and dive deeper into systems/infrastructure engineering work as part of deepening my technical experience.
As I expect the pandemic to wind down in the coming year, I'd like to find a community that I fit into a little better than the one I had as we entered the pandemic. To this end, I'm hoping to find some that are tech & ecologically focused, hopeful about a shared future and putting in the work to build it. Basically: solarpunks.
In hopes of settings some concrete goals for 2021.