2020 year in review

It goes without saying that this year was absolutely insane, but existential threats aside, this year did give me a decent number of things to be thankful about.

Professionally

  • I passed my 1 year mark at Litmus, a company whose product I’ve used in just about every previous role I’ve had. My coworkers are great human beings and I feel like I can continue to grow here. Without divulging a lot of details, I helped enhance some internal company software and served as tech lead for two newly formed teams. I also helped lead the committee that recently launched the company’s engineering blog.
  • I’m now in year 4 of being fully remote. Most people in the industry have gone fully remote with the pandemic, but I’m thankful to have had a bit of a head start, since I know switching cold turkey can be rough. Companies being remote first really does make a difference as opposed to remote friendly, or as I like to call it, “tolerant.”
  • I’m still rocking Ruby on Rails as my daily driver with sprinkles of Vue here and there—technologies that I enjoy working with.
  • I started flirting with Rust in my off time.
  • I went through Rebuilding Rails by Noah Gibbs, which covers the major components of Rails internals.
  • I’ve also started mentoring a couple people who were looking to break into the industry in engineering roles, and I’m elated that they both landed jobs.

Open source…ly

  • Chusaku, a Ruby gem I started in 2019, passed 10,000 downloads and received some lovely contributions from people much smarter than me. I’m encouraged to continue maintaining it not just for my own use, but for the folks who have adopted it into their workflows as well.
  • I helped review PRs for if me, a mental health app that I started contributing to back in 2018. Definitely intending to continue contributing to this project, since it’s especially relevant today.
  • I got a couple PRs (#1418, #1431) merged for DevDocs, a developer documentation tool I use for just about everything on a daily basis. I actually wasn’t aware it was open source until recently, so I was happy to contribute.

Personally

  • I moved to Los Angeles in the latter half of 2019 to help support family, so I’m in my second year of living here. I’ve always wanted to live in California at some point in my life, and it’s been an adventure so far. Thankful for the friends I’ve made here. Thankful that my family is doing alright. Hoping the COVID situation gets under control soon.
  • I brought home the goodest doggo named Luna and she’s helped raise my bar for base happiness. Being remote and raising a puppy should really be a package deal for all dog lovers.

Finally

I think it’s going to be important going into 2021 with the mindset that we need to make progress happen. Whether it’s something at our jobs or things like COVID-19, we can’t just sit around hoping problems are going to magically go away.

Be the magic. Wear a mask. Fight racism. Write semantic HTML.

See you all next year.