2022 in review

Interesting year.

2022 in general

Interesting year. Kept upbeat. Became co-chair of our local primary school. Went through an Ofsted inspection. Took the family away on a beach holiday. Was lucky to be a part of my best mate Rob's wedding. Got lots of laughs during the speech. Switched from jiu-jitsu to boxing and my bad back is truly appreciative. Started tinkering around with music in GarageBand and with our new piano. Grew into my role at work where I feel like I know what I'm doing more often than not.

2022 in Work and Technology

My department at ReedPop did a lot of huge things this year, which culminated in us winning the "team achievement" award at the end of year awards. Pleased that the team got the recognition they deserved, as they are a great bunch. Personally managed to win a "bravery" award this year too. Brave little solider! Small list of achievements: finishing migrating all of our sites to our modern in-house publishing platform without any downtime or major issues. Said goodbye to the last bits of PHP running in production. Survived -- and thrived -- during an audit in the summer. Started serving content via a global CDN and started using ElasticSearch to make our sites faster than ever. Released a steady stream of helpful features and tools. Welcomed people to the team with new skills. Became more organised. Spent lots of time building bridges. Generally had a blast.

2022 in Books

The trend of reading about computer company histories continues. Two highlights for me were On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple and Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!. I found Moby's two autobiographies (Porcelain and Then It Fell Apart) quite entertaining. I also kept coming back to Reflections: An Oral History of Twin Peaks, which is filled with great anecdotes from the making of the first two seasons of Twin Peaks.

2022 in Film and TV

Scream 5 was always going to be top of my list of films to see this year. Still not sure how I feel about it. Halloween Ends was the film I enjoyed the most. Highlights include The Gray Man, Jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and Top Gun: Maverick. Watched a lot of TV but nothing truly standout. Maybe The Watcher.

Looking ahead

Next year? Not sure. The kitchen extension I mentioned last year didn't materialise, but 2023 might be the year for it. I'll be spending a chunk of time thinking about how AI might empower the creation of better journalism. Devoting more time to help the local school. Doing more reading. Might even put my music on the internet.