2021 In Review

And what a year it’s been. Just some personal reflections. I worked from home for 11 1/2 months. 1 business trip, which was the first in ~19 months (and that hasn’t happened in about 12 years). 1 vacation. Became empty nesters as our youngest moved out. Restarted our latke fry. 1 office evacuation. 1 company change. 2 role changes. 3 different managers. And 153 blog posts.

Which was the biggest? That’s easy. Becoming empty nesters. Especially after working from home for over 20 months. It’s amazing how big a house can feel with just 2 adults and one dog. A lot quieter too. But what really made me notice was when I was on that business trip. Both my wife and I have traveled, together and separately since we got married, but for the first time in 30 years my wife spent the 6 nights at home alone. That’s a big change.

After that, it’s probably the change in roles. The move from ATG to Aurora, for as much churn as there was, really wasn’t that big of a change for me at first. My direct team and the larger group around it moved as a unit. We merged in some really sharp folks, but the work didn’t change much, nor did the environment. Picked up a few more responsibilities. Dropped a few as well. But over a few months I went from tech lead on the compute team to tech lead for Tech Foundations. Big change in scope. More indirect. More influence. But still exciting and I’m enjoying the work.

< Interlude for office evacuation >

It’s a little smokey around here
< /Interlude for office evacuation>

And with 153 blog posts for the year, still sharing. Since we moved to Confluence I’ve got a little better access to history so I decided to play around with the confluence API and see what folks like.

Alternatively, there’s the ones with 30+ viewers (since August when we started keeping track)