Accidentally in Code

Tag: 2021

  • 2021 Retro

    2021 Retro

    2021 was not the easiest year for the world, but personally it was a good one in many ways.

    Career

    I hit the one year mark at DuckDuckGo (more on that in: 1 Year @ DuckDuckGo), and got promoted for the second time ever in my career (my last job didn’t have promotions). A lot of my energy has been on building out and scaling the team, and it’s been cool to push some of the things we did to achieve that into the wider organization – such as changes to the hiring and onboarding process. I still get to spend time on product development, such the new products we’re building and better delivery overall.

    Outside of my day job, a focus has been long term plays for what options I want to have open to me in 5 years. I became an LP in the Acquired Wisdom Fund; I’m really excited about the model of investing in experienced founders, and getting a closer insight into early stage companies.

    And, I continued my coaching journey. I took 3/4 courses from the intermediate Co-Active program (one remaining in February), and worked with 3-4 clients at a time over the year, 5 total. I love coaching. I was worried about how I would find the time, but firstly, I find it really energizing, and secondly, it’s only about 2 hours a week. I’m excited to continue that in 2022, although I don’t plan to rush into certification (the Advanced section) as it’s a lot of work and I want to focus on other things for a while.

    I had already given myself 2020 off speaking, and in 2021 I kept it light – I replied to many kind invitations with “unfortunately, I realized I hate giving talks on Zoom”. I gave one talk in person (a terrible mistake) and did 2 talks for the LeadDev Together program because LeadDev are the only people I’ve seen doing great remote events, and I have always loved working with them. I also moderated a panel for them, which is another thing I generally don’t do, but I loved the topic – Manager Mistakes – and got to invite some of my favourite people and play with a format of more in depth conversations (watch it here).

    Generally feeling good about my priorities and trajectory here, and the balance between my day job and the space (both time and emotional) I have to do things outside of it. Hoping for that to continue in 2022.

    Life

    My partner and I passed one year of living together, which was exciting. I can see how surviving lockdowns together would either affirm or destroy a relationship, and I’m grateful that ours was (mostly) affirmed. Once things reopened and the madness of summer accommodation abated (somewhat), we continued the attic renovation that we started in 2020, which continued to be a bit of a nightmare, now because of global supply chains. And since my partner got a job that required him to relocate to the Netherlands, we now have a second place in Rotterdam and are going back and forth. This is extra convenient in the periods where our Irish house is uninhabitable, and we’re figuring out how we want to split our time. As much as moving during a pandemic has been a nightmare, it’s been fun to explore a new city. I really like Rotterdam.

    My fitness goals for 2020 were basically just “do what you can and survive a pandemic” (although I did also get my kayaking certification), but in 2021 I came back to my love of exercise. I caved and became a Peloton person (regular spin bike + app), and have been getting back into regular spin classes. I love the quality of the classes and the on demand nature, I am never going back to group exercise classes. I finally got a yoga mat and started trying to do yoga at least somewhat regularly. The gym has been a bit rubbish in Ireland, with one hour slots, advanced booking etc, and once I was vaxxed and wanting to do personal training again, I discovered that my trainer was an anti-vaxxer. But, I swam as much as possible, especially when we travelled. In Rotterdam I was able to get a good balance in with a mix of cardio/swimming, personal training (the gym right below us does these very intense 30 minute sessions), and spinning. It was great, and I’m excited to pick it back up again when we’re back there (and things are open).

    I did a lot of crafting this year. I started it last winter break as a way to jump start my creativity. I’m not sure how creative I was after that – I mainly followed patterns – but it was a nice outlet, away from the computer. I completed four huge cross stitch projects, and many more smaller ones. I built some fun things using my Glowforge, hardest of which was the mini phone jukebox.

    Our travel was mainly in Ireland this year, other than that I was only in France (for the terrible conference), Croatia (for work) and Rotterdam (to scope it out, and to live). We had a fun time exploring Ireland though, especially now we have a bigger car (a Suzuki Swift replaced Pinkness the Smart car – I still love a Smart car as a city runaround, but it was not fun for driving across Ireland in) returning to some of our favourite places from last year, like Liss Ard and Castlemartyr (we spent a month in one of the holiday homes). We had a weekend in Kinsale, which was lovely and a nice easy way to resume travel again, went to Fota, had a very quick (one night) trip up to Glengarrif to see the Ewe Experience (very weird but charming), went to Killarney to stay at the Europe (amazing, omg the swimming pool), and finally made it to Dingle (after last year’s trip to “not-Dingle”, aka Cahersiveen), where we stayed in a strange and not entirely comfortable place, with a gorgeous swimming pool. The Dingle peninsula is gorgeous though, a highlight was a seaweed bath by the side of the ocean. We also went to the K Club, where my partner enjoyed the golf, and I adored the spa, but we were otherwise a bit underwhelmed. I took my friend for a “decadent sleepover” at the Dean in Cork, which was super fun.

    At the start of 2021, feeling a bit desolate, I booked a bunch of random things spread out through the year, figuring that we would at least get to do some of them. It went better than I expected and we made most things work, and I was really grateful to have things to look forward to. I’m hoping we can travel a bit further afield in 2022 – especially from our base on the continent, but we’ll see. Travel is still not fun in this timeline, and I am fine to wait until it is again. Except for my much delayed trip to St Lucia – originally planned for May 2020, now scheduled in May 2022.

  • 2021 in Photos

    2021 in Photos

    Since 2017, I’ve been posting a photo every day to Instagram and photo.cate.blog. I kept that up last year, posting 361 photos in total.

    In 2021, the aesthetic monotony of pandemic life really started to get to me and this was probably the hardest this project has ever felt. I think part of the appeal of the intense amount of crafting I did was to have something new to photograph at the end of each project. I found myself continually digging through my photo roll to find something – anything – to post, and multiple times I found myself about to post a picture I had already posted before.

    That being said, I’m glad I kept at it. It is a nice and minimal time commitment habit, and I hope when life becomes more “normal” it will feel easier, again, and I’ll be glad I stuck with it.

  • 2021 in Writing

    2021 in Writing

    In 2021, I committed to publishing each Monday. Aside from a couple of narrow misses in October, I kept at it, making 52 posts over the year, up from 20 in 2020 (I wrote more about what this looked like in my retrospective: The Year of Habits). I had 4 articles on LeadDev. I sent 9 WTHIC letters from three countries (Ireland, France and the Netherlands).

    This blog was seen by nearly 39K visitors for over 63K views. This is up from just over 25K visitors for a little more than 41K views in 2020.

    Most Popular Posts 2021

    1. 5 Signs It’s Time to Quit Your Job – a late entrant (published at the end of November) but clearly a timely topic during the Great Resignation. Also one of the most popular 2021 articles in the LevelUp newsletter.
    2. Being the DRI of Your Career – what it means to be the DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) of your career. This post breaks it down into five lines of thinking: expecting less from your job and more from your career, learning from feedback, owning your professional development, distinguishing what your employer rents versus what they buy, and building your support system. This was a relatively quick post but it resonated with people, and I ended up breaking it apart and expanding on each idea within it.
    3. The Return of the Office – on the “Remote Work Debate”, why the pandemic experiment was not set up for success, and the disconnect between what engineers want and think works versus how organizations function.
    4. Three Core Ideas to Make Remote Work, Work – three core principles of remote work: Embrace async, Enable autonomy, Build connection.
    5. The Rent Versus Buy of Career Growth – by far the DRI point that resonated with people the most, understanding what your employer rents, what they buy, and tradeoffs that impact your market value and career decisions.
    6. Expecting More from Your Career (and Less from Your Job) – thinking long term; your job is just a moment in your career, what do you want to get out of it?
    7. On Being “Strategic” – musing on the “she’s just not that strategic” trap, and tactics I use to (try) and avoid it.
    8. Pandemic Burnout; Now What? – how living through a pandemic hits all 6 causes of burnout (only one is overwork) and some thoughts on how we can take the control we have to try and be a little happier.
    9. Coachability++ – slides and commentary for a talk I gave at Qz on being more coachable.
    10. Your Action Plan to DRI Your Career – a summary of the collection of DRI posts, along with a step by step plan to take control of your career.

    Most Popular Posts Pre-2021

    * indicates that this was also on the pre-2020 list last year.
    ** indicates this was on the 2020 list last year.

    1. Testing Intents on Android: Like Stabbing Yourself in the Eye with a Blunt Implement*. Intent testing was not particularly straight-forward, or well documented, and I shared what I found in a weekend of fighting with it. I think this is one of my best technical posts, and it’s nice to see it still getting the attention it deserves! I want to believe this is because more people are writing tests now.
    2. Unfriending on Facebook*. For some reason, in 2010 this search term was sending a significant amount of traffic to my blog, so I wrote an explainer.
    3. Rest Day – Buffer Day – Focus Day*. A post from 2015 about having different kinds of days and themes to make progress.
    4. The Great DomestiCation**. I did a detailed post about the complete house renovation I did in 2018-2019.
    5. How I Offloaded My Anxiety to Trello**. I wrote about my life admin management system, and how I use Trello to keep track of and make progress on the different areas of my life.
  • 2021: Habit

    2021: Habit

    Shakey Bridge, Cork

    We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

    ~Will Durant, paraphrasing Aristotle

    I used to be a fan of setting a word as an intention for the year. I fell off it at some point, or at least off documenting it, I think around the time that my word, in all honesty, was “survive”.

    If I was to capture 2020 in a word it would have been “restore”. I restored order to my life by tacking “life debt”. I restored myself – up to a point – through changing the aspects of my life that were causing disproportionate stress. As the year came to a close, I finally made progress on restoring my sense of creativity.

    Coming into 2021, of course I have some goals (complete my coaching certification, finish the second renovation – the attic), but generally I am more interested in building – or rebuilding – habits that support the way I want my life to be.

    Habits were something I struggled with in 2020, with the constant disruption of a pandemic derailing my “usual” things and background anxiety a drag on progress. I rebuilt my exercise habit multiple times under different constraints with varying levels of success. I struggled to rebuild my reading habit, read primarily novels, and probably less than any other year. I lost my habit of writing regularly, and despite much angsting about it, failed to make meaningful progress on repairing it. I lost my usual good habits around keeping in touch with people, was worse at reaching out, less good at responding…

    But then, habits also helped in 2020. One of the good things that started in lockdown and went on for most of the year was a regular movie night. For all I struggled with rebuilding my exercise habit (and anxiety around the gym I used to train at caused me to switch to a new one), I did exercise pretty consistently for most of the year, and I completed a kayaking certification. I embraced skincare as a hobby and cemented various habits there. My work habits remained pretty stable, and since switching jobs I now maintain pretty reasonable European work hours, which has been big a win for my overall quality of life.

    Coming into 2021, the focus for January is on two things that are daily habits. The first is the continuation of my 12 days of creativity, the January #MakeDontBreak challenge. The second is a course I’m taking with my coach, Positive Intelligence, which has me doing multiple things every day called “PQ reps”.

    I’m debating how I will fit the word “habit” into my life in 2021, maybe I’ll chose another daily habit for February, or maybe I’ll focus on overhauling my regular task lists to support a different assortment of things. I hope it will help ground me amid the uncertainty of living through a pandemic, of surviving the chaos of 2020-part 2.