2022: The Year in Review

Another year is behind us and it’s time for the obligatory “year in review” blog post. I’ve been feeling a bit lazy, that’s why I’m getting to writing it a bit of a delay, but you’ll forgive me.

2022 was another pretty crazy year.

The Bad Stuff

The War in Ukraine

For me the year was definitely defined by the war in Ukraine. It has been a tough year for our family and many of our friends there. Several friends of my wife from her hometown have been killed in action in the past couple of months alone.

My only wish for 2023 is for Ukraine to win the war. If something bad happens to Putin and his warmongers in 2023 - I’d consider this a nice bonus.

Global Economic Downturn

I guess this doesn’t need much explanation, as so many people have been affecting by it. I have a feeling that the worst of the recession is still ahead of us, but I doubt it will be as bad as the one in 2008-2009. Time will tell.

Self-development

I didn’t do much of that front. Wanted to learn and do a lot of new things, but ended up doing pretty much nothing. Classic me.

Reading

I read a lot fewer books than usual. Perhaps starting to re-read “The Wheel of Time” was a horrible idea indeed.

Twitter

My favorite social network has been in free fall after getting acquired by Elon Musk. A lot of people jumped ship already, but I’m still hoping that the situation there will improve with time. I’m on Mastodon these days as well, but I still enjoy using Twitter much more.

I guess old habits are hard to change. Or perhaps that’s the perfect opportunity for me to stop using such social networks completely and remove a huge time sink from my life.¹ Time will tell.

The Good Stuff

Return to (Mostly) Normal Life

COVID seems to be in the rear-view mirror these days and life has mostly returned to “normal”. I had to opportunity to travel a lot in 2022, I’ve met some of my colleagues for the first time since 2019 and I’ve seen again movie theaters full of people. I’ve spent a lot more time with my family and friends. I also attended one in-person conference. That felt good.

I can only hope the pandemic is behind us for good.

Wine

I drank a lot of good wines in 2022. I’ve also visited a French winery for the first time in my life. I’ve met a lot of cool people at wine tastings and wine events in general. Wine certainly grows on me more and more with each passing year.

OSS

It was a relatively good year for all of my projects. A few highlights:

• nREPL made it to 1.0
• CIDER and RuboCop turned 10

I can say a lot more on the topic, but I won’t. I’m still here and I’m still very motivated to build great OSS projects.

Blogging

Surprisingly I bested my all-time blogging record. Let’s see if I’ll be as inspired to write in 2023.

Misc Highlights

New Obsessions

I’m the kind of person who constantly obsesses about something (new). In 2022 my primary new obsessions were:

• OCaml
• Wallets
• Mechanical Watches

I’ve spent a lot of the year playing with OCaml, I’ve watched countless reviews of (slim) wallets (and carry items in general) and mechanical watches and now I have more wallets than I’ll likely need in my lifetime. And a long shopping list for watches. Fortunately their relatively high prices prevent me from making spontaneous purchases.

Currently my primary wallet is the legendary Bellroy Slim Sleeve (which I totally love) and I’m sporting on my wrist a Tissot PRX Powermatic 80. While the Tissot PRX is nothing fancy, the brand has always had a special place in my heart for historical reasons. Apart from that - you’ll be hard-pressed to find another watch of that quality for 650 EUR.

I hope that in 2023 I’ll add a couple of other watches to my modest collection. My favorites so far are:

• Junghans Max Bill 34 mm (manual)
• NOMOS Tangente 35 mm (manual)

I totally love the German Bauhaus-inspired designs! I also find it pretty charming to wind your watch manually every day. (plus manual calibers are cheaper and slimmer than automatic calibers most of the time)

Return to Android

See this article.

Gadgets

As usual I bought a lot of things, that I didn’t really need. My favorite purchases in 2022 are:

• MacBook Air M2 (aka “The Greatest Laptop Ever”)
• Philips OneBlade (if you’re a man I can’t recommend this highly enough)
• Philips Sonicare 5100
• Google PixelBuds A-Series (not the best sound, but extremely light and comfortable)
• Fitbit Charge 5 (a compact no-nonsense fitness tracker to replace my Apple Watch)
• Apple TV (I bought this only because for some reason the Apple TV+ is not available in Google’s Play store in Bulgaria)

Watching “Ted Lasso” certainly wasn’t cheap.

Epilogue

And that’s a wrap. Right now I’m not particularly inspired to write, but knowing me probably I’ll revisit this post a few times over the new next couple of days and extend it a bit.

It’s funny how strong the “recency bias” is - many of the things I’ve mentioned here happened in the final months of 2022 and I can barely remember things from its first half.

I hope you’ve had a great 2022 and that 2023 will be even better for you!