Back in 2020, I set 2021 theme as “The Social Year”: aim to meet more people and sustain more friendships. Like the previous years, I’m assessing three aspects of my life: work, people, and health.
Work
I felt that this year, we have had more Work From Home (WFH) days compared to last year. In a way, I’m happy that my home setup were adequate in supporting WFH for a long period of time. However, at times, I do miss going back to office to socialize with colleagues. Things weren’t as bleak as it sound as there were several team building events that happened and I enjoyed them.
Career-wise, there wasn’t any significant change. This year I was tasked to lead the “Testing Working Group” which is a group who are interested in researching on best practices of writing tests. We’ve produced several guidelines and added several tests to the repository. The result weren’t as significant as I initially hoped for, but definitely these are the groundwork to promote more developers to write test for their work.
People
This year I met considerable amount of new people: random people on the Internet, and people from Buddhist Fellowship Youth. BFY peeps are a bunch of nice and kind-hearted people who supports each other. Outside of the regular service on Saturday, we met up several times for hiking and board games. On the other hand, that those people from Internet are a mix of random people from different backgrounds. However, a highlight of them is Jing, who shared a lot of common interest with me and we supported each other through this uncertain times. I consider her as one of my closest friend now.
Besides new people, I also reconnected with numerous friends from uni times: there are a clique where we met every quarter for food, and there’s another clique meeting only occasionally. With them I even went on Cruise to Nowhere.
Health
This year, I’ve started swimming more often. I scheduled several regular sessions on weekday evenings on top of my regular weekend mornings. This results in 150+ swims this year that covers total distance of 300+ km. I really enjoyed those swim sessions and always looking forward to the next one.
Occasionally, I also did some running during my non-swimming days, but I’ve stopped those so I could get more rest. Swimming continuously over several days can be really draining.
Coupled with eating less carbs, over the past year, I’ve lost around 7 kg. Still some way to go for a healthy BMI, but it’s definitely a good progress.
Conclusion
2021 was a year of many ups and downs. The most frustrating part was when the social gathering rules which kept changing causing me unable to make plans for the near-future. But also because of that, it also meant that when opportunity arises, we need to use it immediately, as delaying it meant risking having it being cancelled.
For 2022, I hope the situations will get better. In the meantime, I’ll make it as year of exploration: to discover the things that are hidden or overlooked. It could be about places, food, or even knowledge. Let’s see what life will bring.
Happy new year 2022!