2022 a Year in Review

Wednesday, Jan 11, 2023 4 minute read Tags: year-review

Would you look at that, 1 year to the day since I did my 2021 post so I’m consistently late, woo!

Blogging

Towards the end of last year I read this post by Scott Hanselman about his decreased blogging, and it really resonated with me and how I’ve been feeling about blogging. While I haven’t blogged for quite as long, my oldest post is from 2008 (but it’s not actually my oldest, I’m missing some of my earliest stuff due to sloppy migrations), I have tried to be consistent but it’s fallen away over the last few years.

In 2022 I wrote 27 posts, which is close to as many as 2021 and some similarities in the content, such as a continuation of my GraphQL on Azure series.

I also kicked off a new series about my smart home journey, which will continue throughout this year as I keep dabbling with stuff.

Presenting

In person conferences were back! 🥳

I was fortunate enough to present at three in person events this year, NDC Melbourne on VS Code and GraphQL with TypeScript (although that talk had some awesome demo failures 😅), DDD Perth about VS Code (yes, same talk as NDC Melbourne, nothing wrong with reusing the classics!), and NDC Sydney Remix and why to use GraphQL (those talks aren’t online yet).

There was a smattering of virtual talks as well at various user groups and online events, but I’m really glad to be back in person and able to connect with the community that way. Although I must admit, I had forgotten just how exhausting in-person events were, by the end of a multi-day in-person event, I’m very much ready for a rest!

I’m hoping that we continue to see events coming back in 2023, I’ve already got a few locked in and am hoping to see some more user groups come back as well.

Building a house

We finally finished building the house we started in 2021, well by we I mean the building company we contracted, and moved in at the middle of the year. While for us it seemed like it was taking foreverrrrrrrrrrr it ran on time and shockingly on budget.

It’s nice to be settled back into our own space, I now have my own purpose-built office (with a giant 1.8m by 1.7m floor plan 😅), the kids have their own areas to play in and most importantly, I can tinker with smart home stuff!

As I said before, I’m blogging about my smart home but the blog is somewhat a trailing indicator to where we’re really at. Other things that I have integrated but yet to blog about is climate control with our connected HA, our digital door lock, and our garage door + automatic gate. So stay tuned, there’s more coming in that space.

Burning out

The big thing for me in 2022 was burning out and then coming to grips with having done that. I wrote about being burn out last week and the response that I got from the post was really heartwarming. So many people reached out both publicly and privately to check if I was ok, to share that they’ve been experiencing the same, and to offer support.

Several people have told me that they found it really brave of me to share such a vulnerability in such a public way, but I really don’t see it like that, I’m just someone who is lucky enough to have a bit of a platform and if I can’t use it to destigmatise mental health issues, then what’s the point?

Moving to something new

As I was coming to grips with my burnout and looking at what I wanted to change to help me work through it, I realised that it was time to tackle some new challenges, and I’m excited to announce that that will be happening in 2023. Don’t worry, I’m not going far, I’m moving from the JavaScript team to the .NET team within Cloud Advocacy. This feels like a better fit for me, as much as I love JavaScript, .NET is where my heart always has been and I’m looking forward to tackling some of the challenges facing .NET developers in regards to Azure.

But yes, I do appreciate the irony that in my burnout post I talked about having a lot of managers to then go and have yet another manager come 2023, but I have already congratulated my new manager on the promotion they’ll receive in about 5 months time! 🤣

Bring on 2023!