I’m personally happy with where things are at the end of this year. We’re on a vacation to visit our family after three years. My kids met some of their cousins for the first time and they’re incredibly excited to get the attention from the extended family. Living in a country half a globe away from our origin means they hardly ever get to experience the warmth of the family and Covid made everything so much harder for the last few years.
Speaking of living away from the family, earlier this year we also moved from our home in Canada to the US. We drove a large U-haul across the border because the pandemic time logistics suck and truck drivers weren’t keen to go through a mandatory Covid test and possibly get stuck at the border for two weeks. The physical move to WA turned out to be rather simple. But the paperwork after the move was plentiful. Not sure if you had to change your phone number recently, but it’s 100x more time consuming than updating your address. Almost all of the online accounts needed to be updated because of 2FA. We had to re-establish our life with setting up new schools, health systems, and a new social life. As I said before, I feel good at the end of this year, but these transitions have been all-consuming for me personally, and also for the whole family.
Technically, I looked at a couple of new topics, crypto and the rust-lang, with curiosity despite my initial reservations against both. I learned the core concepts behind web3, blockchains and the startup-VC ecosystem surrounding crypto. Some ideas such as IPFS and blockchains for immutable and public data and smart contracts fascinated me. I’m yet to see a better UX offered by these new breed of technologies compared to what we have today. I think a linked list (e.g. blockchain) as a backing datastore isn’t scalable for most transactional systems without adding some form of higher layer databases. I didn’t spend as much time on Rust because I didn’t build an app. I skimmed through the main ideas and it seems like a solid step forward from C/C++. That’s also why I lost interest quickly, I love Ruby and that tells you I belong to the territory of higher level languages instead of more system level ones.
I’ve read a few books this year and thanks to the good weather, listened to a bunch of audio books as I took many long walks. I feel like these days I enjoy learning from video and audio content better than reading books. Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson is the most memorable book for me from this year. It’s a fascinating story of a genius. I kept thinking how one person can be deeply interested in so many different topics and how he found art in everywhere be that in the human body, nature, war machines, or buildings and utility networks. I didn’t know he was a vegetarian out of his love for animals! I also loved the fact that the book talked about his imperfections such as many projects that he started but never completed, and how he acted like a typical practical human being to stay within favours of the powerful. I ended up with an impression that Leonardo was a human like many but with an abundance of curiosity and creativity. If anything, I should learn from his habit of journaling everyday, and post more than one blog post in a whole year!
Financially, this has been an interesting year. We got lucky as we cashed most of our investments at the start of the year before the market took a plunge. On the other hand, we ended up getting into the real estate market at its peak. Overall, it’s been a good year financially.
One area that I struggled this year has been with forming a small group of folks for casual meet-ups. I finally found a soccer team and a partner to play tennis with, and it’s given me a sense of normalcy after the move to the US. But I’m still craving some regular company for casual chit-chats over a long walk. I could’ve done better to get more intense exercise, specially with a fully equipped gym in our beautiful Google office. At the end of the year, I feel like I’m not worse off in terms of health. Scott says, how you feel in your forties is a result of how you spend your thirties. I have one year left to reach my forties and I better get my act together this year.
Another area I’ve really struggled with is dealing with distractions and my self-care. Screen time, specially pickups, has been unhealthy. At times, I’ve been clueless about how to spend my free time and resorted to doom scrolling. I’ve distracted my mind watching random videos on YouTube quite a bit. This has to stop and it better be soon.
I didn’t write as much in 2022. I had a few topics I wanted to write and give talks about. But, I’ve been tired and had to focus on feeling a little more energized. This is still a work in progress, but I definitely feel optimistic about how things are now. Looking forward to what comes next.
One last thing, congratulations to Messi for winning the FWC 2022. What a privilege to watch him play for the last 16 years.