2021 in review

i'm not sure how but every year around november-december time i seem to get myself into situtations where i feel deathly ill/incur some kind of major physical trauma leaving me bound to laying in bed; this year being no different...

some things have changed this year however! though before enumerating over those i'll take a look at the things i said i wanted to get done this year:

  • ๐ŸŸก Finish the Duolingo tree: admittedly i have fallen off a bit with the norwegian, though only because my priorities have shifted somewhat: this year according to duome.eu/cwassie i've done 361/590 lessons on the tree. the norwegian tree is the longest on the platform & i'm fairly happy with the progress i've made reading-wise with the language
  • ๐ŸŸก Get to B2 CEFR level: i think i'm probably around an A2-B1 which the level of content i can read/understand, which is ok considering i havent done a whole lot these last 3 months other than maintain
  • ๐ŸŸข Improve fitness: I did get an exercise bike and use it a fair bit at the start of the year, more recently I've been playing a lot of beatsaber which has helped a bunch with consistent exercising
  • ๐ŸŸก Release the MVP: more on that later
  • ๐Ÿ”ด Sell some microgreens at the local farmers market
  • ๐Ÿ”ด Go on holiday to either Norway/Japan: covid still being cringe
  • ๐ŸŸก Stop trying to achieve perfection: on and off achieved this one
  • ๐ŸŸข voice training: yep, started off good, had a shit time with an SLT, stopped for 6 months and then started again, with some success too ^^ maybe this year i will stop being such a huge pussy and use it outside my house

and the things i'd liked to have done?

  • ๐ŸŸข Add i18n to this site: yup did this, and did end-to-end typesafe i18n to a full-stack app -- which was fun
  • ๐ŸŸข Dress more fashionably: arguably my most successful point, if nothing else by virtue of having a lot of expendable income
  • ๐ŸŸก Soft skills i guess? a lot of this is tied to my voice, but other stuff like time management i've improved a lot on
  • ๐ŸŸข Make mistakes: ohhhhhhhhhhh yes.
  • ๐Ÿ”ดMaybe climb Snowdon: nope..though i will for sure this year!

this year

  • got my own place: no more house sharing! have a nice 3 bed, 2 bath, garage & garden in a comfy welsh town
  • did a big startup thing: wrote a shitload of code, like a stupid amount building an event driven livestreaming & vod platform, my own node backend framework, ci/ci pipeline from scratch, docker, terraform, gh actions, GCP cloud registery/run/compute/storage/sql - the whole 9 yards, maybe i'll open source it if it all goes tits up
  • left said startup thing: ultimately was sucking away my entire life for basically no money, working with very inexperienced people in a product i only really liked because of the technical challenge it presented - once that was done much of the motivation dissipated
  • discovered norwegian music whole world of pretty nice tracks have made themselves available to me now I can actually understand what they're saying: case in point https://open.spotify.com/track/2hY3vrkl5VOvbYM4uU08PU?si=fbf920dc06564f39
  • some personal projects: significantly less due to startup hoovering all my time
  • learned new tech/tools: Mostly devops, upping my TS-fu and learning a new stack
    • Terraform/GH Actions
    • bunch of GCP tooling
    • Jest / frontend testing
    • React/Next.js
    • Tailwind
    • Nest.js
    • more MongoDB (can't say i'm exactly thrilled about these last 2)
    • Go, been learning this more recently and quite enjoying it

anyways, for 2022:

things to do

  • actually use vim
    • stop using vscode
  • get back onto doing norwegian
  • big choppa
  • write more go
    • complete some of my project ideas from this last year
  • escape voicehon
  • leave the cloud, go fully local powered by solar
    • take this site off the https:// and onto the gemini://
  • make game maybe

intentioanally cryptic and vague list is intentionally cryptic and vague. til neste gang!