Usually it’s monthly collection of things that got me thinking hmming. But this is the end of the year, let’s do a little retrospective.
Retro
What happened this year:
- My title switched from “tester” to “engineer”. Yay?
- Had a great time at ASC 2020 conference. Yes, it’s not my first conference, but this one left a good long-lasting aftertaste.
- I ported blog from pelican to hugo and started a redesign. Still much to do and polish, but at least the base is sound.
- Joined Obsidian community.
- As a consequence, I unwillingly created a YouTube channel in Russian. It’s cool to learn new skills (audio cleaning, video editing), but to be honest, content creation in Russian isn’t exactly a lucrative or professionally valuable hobby. Still, I cannot say no to people asking to teach or explain something: knowledge sharing is one of the biggest values to me.
- Finished Finnish tree on Duolingo. Don’t ask why, I, person living in Quebec, learn Finnish. I just want to! Se on täydellinen kieli.
What didn’t happen:
- Bought a graphic tablet but didn’t do any drawing lessons. Though, I do use it for YouTube.
- The guitar is collecting dust again.
- Didn’t go to Kazakhstan.
2020 taught many not to make plans, good thing I never was much of the “goals” person anyway. Still, here are my themes for 2021:
- At least once be a conference speaker or a podcast guest.
- Content creation: stable every other week, either this blog or Russian YouTube channel (or maybe English?). Concentrate more on tutorials.
- Guitar. Must. Be. Conquered. To make the promise more realistic, I hereby vow to start daily lessons as soon as I finish levelling my main in ESO to CP 810 (yup, I’m still playing it).
- Begin drawing lessons in the 2nd half of the year. Luckily, there was a great post on Habr about it.
You may notice almost an absence of professional goals. Typical end-of-year posts often contain promises to read more or learn new professional skills/tools. But my to-read/to-watch/to-learn queue is on the opposite side: it must be scaled down occasionally; I’m definitely not one of those people who seems to have an endless fountain of energy to do everything (aksi, talking about ya here).
Advent of code
This was the first time I did Advent of code with the devs from work: nice to compare with normal people and not reddit stars. Cannot express how happy I’m to be back to Python, it’s so readable and clear after JS/TS madness.
