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.
