End of year review 2023
Although I didn't write much, this year was still very active for me because of all the organizing that I did. I also pushed myself to new heights with my Japanese cuisine skills, cooking at scale that I've never cooked before. I also progressed a lot careerwise finally getting certified in AWS and writing my first real software library. All in all, I was very busy. No wonder I felt tired at the end of this year!
Here's the bucket list of things I experienced during this year.
- Personal
- I arranged a group of friends to Tampere for some sauna and beer in the summer, this was during a peak season weekend because of the ice hockey championship finals.
- I bicycled nearly 5000 kms, in total. Compared to last year, I've bicycled 3000 kms more.
- I again became a godfather to another friend's daughter.
- Got better at disc golf. My backhand throws got way better this year.
- I started taking cholesterol medication.
- I went camping during the summer. (Not with a camping van, but stayed at a camping area.)
- I also started playing many games such as Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and Super Mario Wonder, and Minecraft. Latter two I play together with my children.
- Work
- I arranged a belated housewarming party for our Helsinki office.
- Wrote and published my first Clojure library, oksa, which allows you to generate GraphQL queries using Clojure (malli-like) data structures.
- I got certified as an AWS architect associate (SAA-C03).
- First customer trip abroad (to the Netherlands).
- Participated in 7 incidents in Q3 alone, led two incidents this year (first time for this customer), and wrote a postmortem using the hero's journey writing technique which was praised by leadership.
- I led multiple threat modelling sessions this year (a process I had defined last year). The key results of one threat modelling session in particular was turned into an epic and released into production in Q3.
- I was a scrum master for a brief amount of time.
- I experienced a HR de-escalation process which taught me a lot about how to communicate more idiosyncratically with neurodivergent people.
- Some minor burnouts here and there, but I managed to pull through all of them!
- Food
- I arranged a 15-piece Japanese dinner for my friends around Japanese National Foundation day. Dishes were:
- Cucumber with sweet miso
- Hiyayakko
- Napa cabbage with yuzu and shio koji
- Sake-steamed chicken with yuzu kosho pepper
- Edamame two ways (chili & buttery soy sauce)
- Miso cured daikon
- Pickled daikon and grapes
- Eggplant in soy sauce
- Sliced salami and onion
- Yuzu marinated turnips
- Teppanyaki
- Izakaya potato salad
- Nagoya tebasaki
- Ebi chili
- Battleship curry
- I made duck soba for the first time. Best casual dinner experience this year.
- I made slow-poached salmon in shio koji, thyme, and olive oil for the first time. Best restaurantesque experience ever.
- My favorite deep-frying experience was definitely yurinchi.
- I bought a portable induction stove and have used it for shared-table experiences like sukiyaki and nabeyaki udon.
- I made this purchase based on a loaned teppanyaki frying pan. Can recommend this, it's a lot of fun and scales nicely to 4~6 people depending on what you're cooking.
- Managed to make sushi rice without burning any of it at the bottom.
- Turns out the secret is to wash the rice very thoroughly using a sieve.
- I arranged a 15-piece Japanese dinner for my friends around Japanese National Foundation day. Dishes were:
- Boardgames
- I arranged a 13-player tournament game of EastFront using the 1943 Stalingrad scenario (which we had never played before in our 15-year tournament history).
- Unfortunately due to family sickness, I was unable to attend this. Game still played nicely because of all the prep work & last-day volunteers :-)
- Played Here I stand as the Pope.
- Loved being at the center of action, trying to balance things out by combatting Lutheranism while staving off kinetic attacks from England. Because of bad cards dealt to me, England decided to make a play for Florence... and succeeded!
- I arranged a 13-player tournament game of EastFront using the 1943 Stalingrad scenario (which we had never played before in our 15-year tournament history).
- Books
- In a book club at work, we read the Google SRE book all the way to the end. I've already published my book club notes in a previous blog post.
- In the end, I was also leading the book club.
- I read a ton of children's books!
- In a book club at work, we read the Google SRE book all the way to the end. I've already published my book club notes in a previous blog post.
Next year I hope I will:
- Do more programming.
- Work on more meaningful infrastructure pieces.
- Enjoy life and friends.