Year in review - 2019

DECEMBER 29, 2019  ·  630 WORDS

Here are a few things I did this year and some goals for the coming year.

Work

This year has been significantly different than any other in all of the 23 I've had so far. I started my first full-time job this February after graduating college. Working full-time is a very different experience as compared to college. There are clear pros going for the working routine but it does take away some amount of freedom. I could very easily stay up till 3 AM on a Tuesday night, hanging out with my friends in college but I can't really do that now because well, I have to go to work on Wednesday. I do however appreciate the weekends free of worrying about deadlines.

I started working at Braintree as a Software Developer on the Bank Payments team. I've learnt a lot of new things about how full stack development works at a level much higher above my personal projects. I feel like the knowledge I have about these systems is still very superficial and I aim to get more depth in the coming year.

I worked on a couple of side projects but kind of left them halfway. I tend to do this quite a bit. Next year, I want to make one side project but see it completely to the end (or something that can be used by at least one person other than me).

Running

I have run consistently throughout the year and completed 585.1 KM. My pace has improved steadily and even the distance that I can run has increased. I can run a 10K without feeling dead afterwards.

I plan to run a 1000 KM this year and hopefully the San Francisco Half Marathon in late July.

Travel

I've been to a few places this year. Mostly before starting full-time work.

  • Thailand
  • Maldives
  • Japan

Also a bunch of places within the US and India. This year I have already planned to travel to South Africa and a couple other countries (hopefully).

Reading

I didn't get a lot of reading done over the year but I really liked the ones I did end up reading.

  • Shortest Way Home by Pete Buttegieg
  • Shoe Dog by Phil Knight
  • The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
  • Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

I have a lot of books that I want to read this year already shortlisted and I aim to spend some of the binging time on completing those books.

Movies

I love watching movies and these are a few of the ones I really loved.

This year I plan to collect data about my viewing activity on trakt.tv.

Music

According to Spotify, I've listened to 44,321 minutes of Music this year. It of course does not include the time spent on YouTube and on my Vinyls.

Misc.

I like collecting data about myself and this year I've tracked all my spendings to the last cent and my weight every day to the last gram. I want to continue doing it and build my own web applications to store my data. I also tried to learn Spanish on DuoLingo for about a couple of months. I understand a little bit now and I would love to get better at it.

I also want to focus more on my work and get a deeper/clearer understanding of the work I am doing and frontend development in general.

This year turned out to be very productive and I hope to continue and improve on this trend in the coming year.