2022 Year retrospective

I'm a little late to the party of doing retrospectives. But 2022 was one of the most challenging years I had since I was a teenager. I wanted to reflect and wrap up things.

Last year I struggled both personally and at work to perform well and maintain decent productivity. I have been through some of the most depressing months in the middle of the year due to some personal issues. I bounced back from that but work was taking way too much of my mental bandwidth. I had high hopes and was looking to learn a lot in 2022 but I didn't do any of it.

Ironically, the post I linked above was my last blog post in 2022. I was promoted to a different role and my team size has grown from 1 person to 35 people just in 9 months. Processing this and adjusting to the dynamics of the new role was hard. On top of it, I had to play my part as an individual contributor too. So I never had the energy or time to focus on anything other than work.

I think I did a decent job of managing the team and setting up the base for what's next. One thing I regret is not being able to spend more time on each individual in the team because of the size of the team. Still, I'm not sure if I made my team's life better or worse.

It was not all that bad. Later in the year, I joined the gym again and started working out seriously. Lost a few kilograms and gained some good muscle. Right now, I'm in the best shape I've ever been. I fixed a few of the personal issues and let go of some of the emotional baggage and started to feel better, working out helped a lot to improve my mental health. This was also one of the years where I met a lot of new people, made some great friends, and socialised a lot.

At the year-end, I finally realised I was trying to fit myself in a role which is not suitable for me, at least not at this scale. I talked about it with my manager and we have agreed to pivot into a better-suited role which focuses more on the tech side as an individual contributor.

Looking forward to

I'm not looking forward to doing much in 2023. I just want to focus on very few things and get them done well. My main focus will be on getting back to the IC track and improving my Rust skills. I've also been thinking about learning node and another frontend framework (probably Solid, reason unknown).

I'm also going to reduce the barrier of acceptance for a blog post so that I can write and publish more often. If I wrote at least one post a month this year, that'll be a great step for me. Let's see what's in the store for 2023.

Happy new year.