Year in Review 2022

The year 2022 was eventful.

Apart from war and dealing with emotions, I’ve managed to visit a lot of places, meet my colleagues face-to-face for the first time, read a bunch, code a bunch, and dive deeper into the world of writing.

Fitness & Health

I’ve run 509km. It’s the least since I’ve started tracking my running 8 years ago. It must be the consequence of moving from beautiful mountainous Innsbruck to city of Vienna. Running through the city is not as much fun as running in mountains.

Good news is that I wasn’t lazy. This year was more diverse in sport activities. I did a fair amount of gravel biking (2372km), swimming, a bit of yoga and a ton of walking. My Apple Watch reports 11,3km walked per day for 2022. Can’t complain about that.

Reading

Long time ago, I figured that my optimal reading pace is 1 book per 1 month. And this year was no different.

I actually went through more than 12 books, but when I didn't like it, I stopped reading it.

These are my top 12 picks for 2022:

  1. The Story of Sex: From Apes to Robots
  2. Four Thousand Weeks
  3. Movement: How to Take Back our Streets and Transform Our Lives
  4. Extreme Programming
  5. The Almanack Of Naval Ravikant
  6. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
  7. The 10% Entrepreneur: Live Your Startup Dream Without Quitting Your Day Job
  8. Will (by Will Smith)
  9. The Thank You Economy
  10. Spotify Untold: How a Small Swedish Start-Up Changed Music Forever
  11. How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going
  12. Mýty a naděje digitálního světa (CZ book → Myths and hopes of the digital world)

Writing

I’ve managed to publish 5 tech posts and 2 book reviews. It’s not as much as I planned, but on the bright side - it’s the most I’ve ever published in a single year.

Apart from publishing to my blog, I also took the Ship 30 for 30 writing course where I published another 16 posts.

The course itself was really cool. I didn’t have high expectations but it turned out to be packed with simple yet very valuable tips on how to write and publish. I can gladly recommend it to anyone who wants to pick up writing as a skill.

My most successful post 20 Principles I Learned From 10 Years of Developing Software was visited 6x more than anything I’ve published. It’s clear that people like to read about the experience of others in a condensed form. Exactly the opposite of what they taught us at school.

Programming & Career

This year I’ve made 966 commits. Most of them were for Lokalise, but I’ve managed to do some open-source contributions as well.

The amount of commits on its own is a useless metric, but when plotted on the activity chart, it tells the story of my year.

GitHub commits activity chart for 2022
GitHub commits activity chart for 2022

The first part of my year I was involved in refactoring the Team Setting. The second part I’ve spent on building a brand new Comments UI. Both of these are nicely visible on the timeline including the break in summer and November. December was calm as I was moving into a new team to work on my next big thing - Translation Editor, which I’m really excited about.

Plans for 2023

I don’t have any plans for 2023 yet. I’ve decided to start easy and have no big upfront plans. I have some ideas about what I would like to focus on, but I don’t want to commit to them yet. I’m taking January to think it through and have a good time.

Happy new year!