2023 - Year in review

We are at the end of another year and this year passed at light speed for me. Lot of months felt just like couple of weeks, and here we are writing another annual review. This year was a lot better than the last year for me, even though I did not do a lot of things I wanted.

At work, I completely moved away from the engineering manager to an individual contributor role. Sometimes, I do miss working with few excellent people in my team and the hustle nature of the role. But it was a good decision for all of us involved in the long run.

The hardest change was the lose of power and influence. I was a big fish in a small pond and suddenly I'm just another one in the 100. I'm no longer part of the decisions and don't get to sit at the table where important decisions are made. But that's okay, life is way better for me as I have more time to do the things I like than keep attending to burning fires.

Due to my optimisations and workflow as a manager, my attention span was fragmented. I still have trouble focusing on one task for an extended period of time. On some days, work just flows through and on some other days, it is hard for me to even sit and focus on one item. Deadlines and pressure to deliver on time helps though. But I love it when I was able to fix a nasty bugs after hours of debugging and analysis.

I only read 9 books this year as compared to 18 last year and I read mostly fiction this year, which is ok. But I read a lot of articles this year through Readwise Reader that could amount to some quality reading. I wanted to write more on this blog but only wrote 3 posts. The main thing that ate my time was watching Anime. I finished watching Naruto and Shippuden and loved it.

Another important personal update is that I learned to drive and bought a car this year. I never felt the need for a car until I was pissed enough by public transportation. After months of research and test drives, I got a Honda Amaze. There could be cheaper or better cars, but for my needs Amaze is the best VFM and that's what buying a car is all about. I'm even thinking of doing car consultation as a side hustle because of the insane amount of time I spent learning about cars on Reddit and Youtube 😝.

Initially I was very afraid of driving in Indian roads, India is not for beginners as they say. I did not even want to take the car out anywhere. But with the help of Youtube, Reddit and some friends, I was able to drive in most of the average situations in our roads and finished my first 5k kilometers milestone within 3 months. This is the best thing that happened to me this year.

What's for next year?

I still haven't finished fighting the borrow checker. I want to continue learning Rust and write more code and side projects with it. I also want to write some production code in Rust if I get the chance.

I'm mildly interested in Golang now and want to have some basic knowledge of it. I'm laughably outdated on server side stuff now since most of my work is on frontend. So I want to get some hands on with AWS and devops.

After working for 6 years in Angular I really want to look ahead of it. I like Angular a lot, it helped me pay bills and in climbing my career ladder a lot. But nowadays it is boring to keep writing the same stuff and frontend code. I want to get back into backend for some time or for a few projects at least.

I want to start reading more again and write more blog posts. I made some great connections when I was active on Twitter and this blog. I want to start blogging again on a regular basis.

I hope you all had a good year and is looking forward to 2024 as me. Happy new year.