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Yearly review: 2022

27 Jan 2023

A shadow of me, duplicated three times and placed on top of eachother. Illustrating the theme 'everything at once'

At the beginning of every new year, I take a look back at what happened in the year before.

I don’t write this article for other people (although nearly 80 people read my review last year), but for myself. It’s writing-therapy.

These yearly reviews are a way to reflect and learn, but also a ‘congratulations’ to myself. I often get the feeling that I didn’t accomplish anything, and with my yearly review I realize that my years are actually quite action packed. Sophia Prater said it best in her December newsletter: it’s a brag list. I take some time to brag about my activities.

Last year I could distinguish a couple of themes: research, machine learning, writing and note-taking. My interests didn’t shift that much, but I think there was more focus on consciousness and ‘selfness’, and a bit less hard-machine-learning.

The big theme of 2021 was the crossing of thresholds: trying out new stuff, switching jobs. The theme of this year is more ‘everything, everywhere and all at once’: my activities, thoughts and emotions were all over the place. I started many more projects than I finished: will 2023 will be a year of wrapping up this undirected energy?

Writing

I wrote 4 articles on my Medium account:

On this blog I further published two more articles:

I also updated my article with tips for saving gas. There are now 21 tips. Sadly, this listicle also didn’t perform that well: just 333 people viewed it. A big comfort is that I know some people that read it used it to save gas and money.

I created three ‘weird ideas’ for my 1001ideas blog:

I published 11.423 words this year, which is down from nearly 20K words last year. I wrote a lot more, but it’s still in draft.

An excerpt of the puzzle, showing a couple of cryptograms

Easter puzzle 2022

I created another Easter puzzle. Last years theme was weird bird names. I think I can officially call it a tradition now that we’ve had three editions. This was the first year I made it in English, which was a great challenge. I’m happy with the way the puzzles turned out, they look a lot better than the year before (I couldn’t get my ‘neon style’ the way I wanted). It was also the first year I had a collaborator: Jesper helped me with testing every puzzle.

737 people played the game.

Work

I’m working at PostNL as a senior UX designer. I designed a new B2B-app, and implemented several large features for the online portal. I organized several workshops: sharing knowledge about target audience and platform, working on long term vision, expert reviews, process improvements.

Also started coaching juniors, this is fun and makes me learn new things also.

Private life

We went to museums a lot more now that my wife and oldest daughter both have a museum-card. I like it.

I (finally!) fixed the office on the third floor of our house. Painting all the walls, laying the floor, adding the decorations… It took a while, but it’s really nice that we now have a good home-office space! We also had solar panels installed.

I started writing a book about ‘patterns’ for workshops. It was fun to start this project, but I got stuck in the details. I blame this on not having enough time to concentrate, but more likely I just lose interest 😆

I also published the book my father wrote. This was a Big Project: I photographed all his illustrations and proofread all the text of the book. I then used Apple Pages to put everything together, and published it on Amazon. I’m incredibly proud of the result: it’s amazing to hold an actual book in your hands (even if you didn’t write it, but ‘just’ published it).

I got my diploma “EHBO voor kinderen” (first aid for kids). I’m afraid I forgot 80% of it already…

My youngest kid started sleeping properly after getting a sleep coach: easily the best investment of the year (better even than the solar panels).

I grew a mustache: I got fed up with my facial hair and tried something new. It is still difficult to get the mustache to stay ‘kind of’ in the way I want 👨

My brand new mustache

Lots of fun with the kids, organizing stuff for birthdays and a huge summer party at school. Every day I write a new word on a board in my daughter’s room: she’s learning how to read.

Thoughtmaster

I’m working on a new note-taking app. This year it went through at least three iterations: a Laravel version, a Django+Vue version and a Django+React version. In the beginning of the year the app development got a big increase because a friend started helping. A second friend started helping in August, dropped off when his interests shifted.

Media consumption

It took me the better part of this year to read Figure It Out. It’s a great book, although the real meat is in wedged in-between two theoretical parts. Didn’t read other books, but devoured hundreds of articles. I rediscovered RSS, and there’s a wealth of great stuff for free online!

Watched:

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