2023 year in Review
2023 has been a fantastic year for me. I have delivered a lot of projects at work. My first child was born. I got promoted as a staff software engineer and a lot more. I want to jot down all the things that I remember as much as I can.
At work
- I pushed Typescript migration of 100KLOC frontend application at work to completion at the start of the year. The last 20% of the migration took more than 6 months. I kept chipping it away whenever there was a break from product development towards the end of last year.
- I worked on implementing a couple of Dataflow pipelines in Java. Never thought I will write Java professionally. It was a bit verbose but the DX writing Java was pretty good.
- I built a full stack application from scratch along with a new team. We used Firebase for everything i.e, hosting, cloud functions, database, background jobs.
- I have hired and onboarded 5 new engineers at my company. The highest amount of engineers I have ever recruited in a year.
- I got promoted a staff engineer at my company. Now I lead three teams at my company.
- The number of meetings I attend has increased quite a bit compared to any other year in my professional career. Although I expected it, but it’s still exhausting.
- I worked on the migration of a large table (half a billion rows) from Postgres to BigQuery and BigTable. This is one of the toughest problem I dealt with this year.
- I have focussed on building a great engineering culture and work environment for all my teammates. I recognized my passion for engineering is my biggest leverage to make my teammates more excited about the work they do. I feel I am seeing small results from the work I put in, I hope to see even better results in the future.
Outside work
- I gave a talk at a local meetup on React Query after several years.
- Although I have started reading several books, I have finished none.
- I made some minor contributions to a few open source projects. I have led this project for a local non-profit organization.
- I wrote 6 blog posts excluding this one. I have encouraged several people to write as well.
- I wrote a lot of notes for planning and retrospecting. It has been really helpful. I have used Trello and switched to Notion and finally settled Emacs and Org mode and I couldn’t be happier.
- I switched to using M2 Macbook Air as my primary device to work and study. It is awesome. The battery life on this is miles ahead of anything I experienced on Windows/Linux laptops. I have bought an iPhone and an Apple Watch. The ecosystem is pretty good when it all works together.
- Due to my introvert nature, I always find it hard to start a conversation. But this year, I have kicked of several conversations and reached out a lot more people than I usually do in a typical year.
- I have successfully said no to a lot of distractions. A few still slipped through. But overall I had better focus this year than the past few years.
Some of the things I mentioned here probably can be blog posts themselves.
If you have read till the end, consider writing your own retrospective and sharing it
Thanks a lot for reading. Wish you a happy new year. Looking forward to another great year.
Some more year in reviews you may like to read
- https://una.im/2023-in-review/
- https://addyo.substack.com/p/23-lessons-in-2023
- https://blog.cassidoo.co/post/bye-bye-2023/
I have tried to persuade a couple of my friends to write year in reviews as well