Moved out in 2022, making this technically the first year of my professional career.
In 2022, among many other things I thought that:
- I can do anything. This revelation stems from this bragging list:
- moving halfway across the country for work, learning to cook well and thriving.
- learning conversational French in under a year.
- building the ultra-low-latency WebRTC radio I’ve been wanting to since 2019.
- leading the product development of my startup.
- I don’t use my phone very often. Investing into a compact, decent camera covers my only remaining use case for a smart phone apart from calls and messages.
- Chic coffee isn’t for me. My Néscafe sachets are perfectly sufficient.
- I should say yes. Any invitation, any suggestion. Always.
- I don’t find joy in video games like I used to once (except Starcraft II!).
- Good friends, aren’t always good travel companions.
- Goa is a lovely place. I might just make it a point to go to there for a bit every year, as often as I can.
- I despise Bangalore as a city and hope I never have to go there.
- I’m rather fond of India and all its whims and fancies. This year more than most. I try to love it for what it is, and forgive it for what it is not.
- The largest boost of confidence in my French speaking ability was holding a conversation with a French person for over an hour at my workplace.
- I don’t mind Typescript. I swear I’m not crazy. HN/IRC had me conditioned to despise it before giving it a fair shot. The biggest revelation for me was that I’d rather have 4 completed projects in Typescript than 0 in Rust.
- Me constantly trying to reinvent the wheel for solved problems is a waste of time and effort.
- Ted Lasso is a joyous piece of entertainment.
- I don’t care for my music taste. I can vibe with nearly anything and everything.
- Working and socialising exclusively with folks 15 to 20 years older than me has made me more mellow, less quick to judgement. I now have fewer reservations about things in general lately.
- Smoking and alcohol are simply social lubricants. All I care about is the conversation.
- Long walks made in solitude make for an excellent creativity fertiliser.
- Melatonin is amazing. Sleep, much like logging, is a solved problem.
- Braces were the right decision for me. Invisalign basically negates all the downside. I really should’ve done it earlier.
- University wasn’t the best experience for me and I’m glad it’s done. So much so that I might never go into education again.
- My tattoo is awesome, it’s minimal and fairly out of the way. Unlike most permanent things I do, I genuinely love this decision.
- The #F1 community on libera.chat is the single best place to have good Formula 1 discourse.
- The letters I send to myself in the future are the most effective thing I have done to get me to worry less, to think less.
In the wise words of a close friend, I tried to produce more than I consume. Thus, I:
- Read 7 books this year. All in French.
- Wrote 8 blog posts.
If 2022 was any indication of things to come, my life’s at the 15° mark of a tan curve.