End of year review 2022

31 Dec, 2022

A photograph depicting the ferris wheel contrasted against a deep-blue cloudless sky Linnanmäki ferris wheel, June 2022

Personal
- My firstborn child started their first school year.
- I went through some (positive) personal health changes in H2.
- I bicycled +1500 kilometres (mostly on my e-bike).
- I travelled for the first time to see my godchild who lives 400km apart.
- I attended one wedding this year, also held a speech there which was very emotionally charged. It was a spectacular wedding! I've never been to a wedding where 13 speeches had been given.
- I introduced household chores into our family calendar, which resulted in remarkable improvement in me getting them done!
- I continued my disc golf hobby this summer. I was able to practise on my backhand throw and improved on it.
- I experienced a masseter massage for the first time. Huge relief!
- Took the plane for a long time (to fly to Oulu).
- We bought blinds for our balcony windows.

An oil painting vertically imposing a yellow diamond-shaped traffic sign saying "Slow down", a pinkish sign saying "and", and a children crossing, blue-hued traffic sign, and at the bottom, in pink, text in hippy typography stating "fix it together" A derivation of Facebook Analog Research Lab's "Slow down and fix your shit", Oil on canvas, 2022, made by me

Work
- I worked as an SRE for almost the entire year and improved my skills on incident handling, postmortem writing, Service Level Objectives (and Indicators), security, IaC, Kubernetes, and AWS.
- I held my first ever meetup talk, titled "Creating an experimental GraphQL formatter using Clojure, Instaparse, and GraalVM".
- I introduced a threat modelling process to my customer's engineering team.
- I introduced conftest to our infrastructure to enforce security policies.
- I burned out three times, but bounced back at the end of the year. (It could have also been the same burnout throughout the year. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It was a tough year!)
- I attempted to kickstart an internal tech radar, but this failed.
- I used Polylith in a sufficiently complex Clojure(Script) project.
- I pushed my AWS certification (SAA-C03) course forward up to about 75%.
- I wrote my first blogpost to our company blog (comes out in January).
- I got a small raise in Q3. There also was a push to the internal salary model, turns out I'm a senior after all. :-)

Self-made pizza warming in the oven using a pizza stone Napolitan-style pizza margherita (IIRC)

Food
- I made hand-made pasta using the pasta machine lent from my dad (which I promised as a new year's resolution).
- I made Napolitan-style pizza from scratch (ditto, new year's resolution).
- I cooked a 12-piece Japanese dinner for my friends on (Japanese) National Foundation Day.
- I learned how to use a flambé tool.
- I bought a new recipe book on vinegared Japanese food. Maybe I'll even use it during next National Foundation Day!

A boardgame trophy presented as a cooler for the victory champaigne Trophy made out of a howitzer's ammunition casing for our annual boardgame tournament

Boardgames
- We arranged a 17-player boardgame, playing the 1944 scenario from a game called EuroFront (2nd edition). Our team also won that particular scenario this year: we were playing as the Soviet Union, taking most of the Balkans, Prague, Berlin, and the eastern parts of Austria.
Books
- I did not read much if any adult books this year.
- We started a book club at work reading Google's SRE book. However, we only got to chapter 12.
- I read a lot of children's books this year.

That's it! I won't try to do bucket list promises this time around for New Year's resolutions. Maybe a book or two? :-)

Bicycle against a winter-y backdrop