2021 in review

Big year.

2021 in general

For me the silver lining of the years of COVID is that they've given me time to reflect on things. What I want from life, what type of person I am, and, what I need to be happy. This last year has hammered home that in almost any circumstance, be it at work or in my personal life, I lean towards optimism. I get gratification and energy from thinking about how to create good outcomes, not how to avoid the bad outcomes. I am happy to take on calculated risk. Beyond that, I love a good walk.

2021 in Work and Technology

Got promoted. Took on even more responsibility. Delivered some big projects. Generally loved it.

Did a lot of reading about effective management. Lots of training. Tried new ways of working. Felt out of my depth at times, in the zone at others. Learned a lot about subscription systems, ElasticSearch, managing teams, managing across teams, large scale migrations, communication up, down, across, and every which way. Tried really hard to be clear in my thinking, my writing, and in my general communication style. Excited about 2022.

2021 in Books

I've become an avid reader of a particular class of books: those that document salacious company histories. Titles like Hatching Twitter, No Filter, Netscape Time, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, Disrupted, Only the Paranoid Survive all caught and held my attention.

A little bit of fiction here and there. Some Kazuo Ishiguro, a little of Richard Osman. Not a huge amount of anything else.

2021 in Film and TV

Way more films this year. Some great ones. Thief, The Gentlemen, Greed, Ford v Ferrari, and The King of Staten Island are films my thoughts keep returning to.

The other big thing for me this year was watching all of Twin Peaks. The original two seasons, the movie, and The Return. Brilliant and all-consuming. In love with Dale Cooper.

Oh, and DAVE. Just perfect.

Looking ahead

There are a few things I want to achieve next year. The first is to see if I can build my Twitter following with some helpful tips about professional things like coding, product design, and process.

The other is to get cracking on an(other) extension to our house. I've enjoyed sketching out the possibilities over the Christmas break and I can visualise how I want things to look and feel.