Another year, another “Year in Review” blog post…except this year, when I had my annual reflection about why I write this post and for whom, I decided to switch it up and make it less retrospective-y and more off-the-cuff.
Bullet Points
- Basked in the glory of completing the 2019 NYC marathon, and wore my medal at home sometimes
- Made zines
- Spoke at 0 conferences and 0 meetups
- Visited Joshua Tree
- Went to LA for very fun team meetup before the pandemic
- Made pretzels
- Ran 1012 miles in the whole year
- Lots of long runs around Pittsburgh and a few near my hometown
- Got great running shoes from Enda
- Started learning Spanish, for real
- Took some lessons with a tutor and used an app to get the basics
- Working through Español en Uso online course from Why Not Spanish?
- Went to therapy almost every week for the entire year
- Figured out a social media strategy that works for me
- Made bread
- Painted a large monster
- Had a very successful garden
- Did a lot of internal and external anti-racism work
- Live blogged about it, then felt mortified and made all of the posts password protected
- Have more responsibility at my job
- The design system is proving itself
- With my team, created our first set of Gutenberg blocks and planned Gutenberg rollout to our entire network of sites (!!)
- Got lots of practice writing unit tests
- Started to break free from the chains of white supremacy
- Felt mortified at architectural decisions my past self made about the design system
- Realized that feel mortified about software decisions made by my past self is part of the job, and working on morphing the mortified feeling into something else TBD
- Spent lots of time with my family
- Worried about COVID-19
- Volunteered with some cool organizations
- Obtained a very cool wall bookshelf and installed it with help
- Started recurring donations to some cool organizations
- Became a mentor
- Started plans for a designer/developer meetup with some great women
- Studied programming languages
- Met a great new boyfriend through online dating
- Read books and started a reading page to track them
- Started using the LOT planner, which I’ve been sticking to
- Redesigned this website by activating the default and excellent Twenty-twenty WordPress theme
- Tried out a project tracking wall calendar thing
- Got a welding lesson from my dad
- Threw away project tracking wall calendar thing
- Led the WordPress Core CSS Chat
- Contributed to the CSS audit scripts for WordPress Core
- Learned to be my most authentic self
- Biked from Pittsburgh to D.C.
- Successfully moderated my alcohol intake without depriving myself of joy
- Made delicious Nepali food with great new boyfriend
- Backpacked the Allegheny Front Trail with great new boyfriend
- Did a hardware hacking project with Johnny Five Inventors Kit with great new boyfriend
- Visited National Parks in Utah with great new boyfriend
- Got another pair of great running shoes from Enda with rainbow soles
- Wrote a decent amount of blog posts
- Updated my job title from Senior Design Operations Engineer to Senior Software Engineer
- Started writing a book (!!!!)
Music
Probably my number one favorite song of 2020:
A curated selection from my most listened to 2020 tracks, according to Spotify, is on a Spotify playlist here.
Pictures
Again, these are in no particular order, but some correspond to bullet points above.
Now, I will sit back and relax as I wait for my brother’s snarky comment after he encounters this post.