My year in words: 2021 #

More working remotely #

This year, Google continued it’s optional remote policy, and I continued to opt to work from home a vast majority of the time (I’ve been to the office twice this year).

I’m not strongly opinionated on where I work, but I’ve found I’m highly productive at home: aside from what I mentioned last year with asynchronous communication, I can really maximize my ergonomic setup with equipment that I could never support at the office.

For example, I added a walking treadmill to my setup a couple weeks ago, which has already proven to be a great way to get exercise in and help me stay focused during the multiple meetings I’m attending.

Stepping down from OpenTelemetry #

All good things must come to an end. In January, I stepped down as approver of the opentelemetry-python project. The project as a whole is making amazing progress, and I’m honored to have contributed a small amount.

Started learning Farsi #

My Japanese has improved a bit over the past couple of years, and I felt it was time to pick up Farsi.

I started my lessons in the middle of the year, and I’ve already felt like I’ve progressed significantly. I’m doing weekly lessons with a teacher I found via italki.

Continuing to learn Japanese #

As my Japanese has progressed quite a bit, I didn’t focus a lot of time on it. I’ve been able to consume most Japanese media and only look up a handful of words every time.

I don’t plan on investing heavily further, beyond continuing to write down vocabularly I don’t know on flash cards and memorize them. I’ve been watching TV such as Hanzawa Naoki and playing games like Judgement. I’m happy with where I’m at, and think the incremental progress I’m making here won’t be worth noting for future years.

Diet continuing the vegan and low calorie path #

Last year, I began the transition to a mostly vegan diet, and I’ve attempted to keep that up this year.

I got to the point of two out of three meals a day being vegan (oatmeal and some nuts for breakfast, and huel for lunch), with a pretty random meal in the evening, generally involving some dairy (primarily cheese).

In particular, the breakfast of oatmeal and the lunch of Huel’s Hot and Savory were particularly effective in helping me with better eating habits. The two combined were roughly 800 calories, which, calibrated at a 2000 calorie-a-day target, resulted in 1200 calories that could be used toward my dinner or snacks in between.

The diet also did help curve my cravings for sweets a tiny bit. However, I still haven’t progressed much on eliminating excess sugar from my diet: my sweet tooth is hard to curb.

Small technical contributions #

My free time was mostly focused on my language learning (along with other responsibilities like raising my kids), but I did have some time to play around with some minor technical things:

I migrated some of my Python projects from my own Uranium build system to Make and pyproject.toml-based projects
authored mem-xrandr to help me with switching displays.
Migrated a personal project from ECS to GKE.
merged my first PR into Kubernetes!.

Goals for 2022 #

2022 will continue to be a year with fairly conservative goals: language learning in particular is considerably more time consuming than I predicted, and I’d like to keep some buffer room in case more difficult tasks pop up to achieve my goal of fluency in Farsi and Japanese.

For 2022, my goals are:

Improve my Farsi (1 1-hour lesson a week, homework, and memorize flash cards).
Continue to consume Japanese books, TV, and games to add new vocabularly.
Eliminate excessive added sugar from my regular diet. My goal is to be below 15 grams of added sugar most days.
Produce no plastic waste on a normal day for my daily routine (just for items I consume personally, like coffee from a stand).
Finish up tome and start evangelizing it more.

Conclusion #

2021 feels like a continuation of 2020 in many ways. But I’m optimistic for 2022: we have to continue to adjust with the world that we live in, and continue to progress toward the next goal of our lives.

Happy New Year!