2022 In Review

Most people say that the previous year flew by. For me, 2022 felt like it took forever to end. That's not necessarily a bad thing because I'm in no rush for my short time on Earth to pass by. But I do find it interesting how people can interpret how fast or slow time can pass by even though it's going at a steady pace.

Anyways..

Let's talk about 2022.

🐜 Personal Life

Family

Family is doing great. I'm extremely grateful that everyone is healthy, happy and we all seem to like each other. Whenever someone asks me how I feel about being a father, I always tell them that the first year is the hardest and it's smooth sailing after that. Well, I've slightly adjusted my stance on that. My daughter is in the first grade and she's already a smarta**. She likely gets it from me so I can't be mad and it's hilarious but also difficult.

🌮 Health & Fitness

Health

I started doing jui-jitsu in 2022 and while I absolutely love it, damn it's hard on the body. Between the ligament strain, micro-fractures and the ever-tender ears, this is the most injury-ridden I've ever been. Jui-Jitsu is something I see myself in for the long haul. I'm a very competitive person and this sport is great for that. Nothing like one on one combat for fun right?

Fitness

One of my major goals last year was to run my first marathon. I'm happy to say that I accomplished that goal and I plan on doing another one at some point (although not next year). The best thing about completing the marathon wasn't the actual race but it was the training. I lost a good amount of weight, learned that I could push myself further than I thought possible and listened to a lot of great podcasts.

👨🏾‍💻 Career

Not really much to say here. I started a new job at the beginning-ish of last year and it's very treating me well. Being both a Front-end developer and a UI designer is a strange thing for a few reasons:

• What do we call ourselves? UI Developer? UX Developer? Front-end developer? Some kind of engineer? Does anyone really care?
• How do you stay on top of the latest design trends and best practices while also staying up to date on the newest development technology?
• Can someone really be great at both or do we have to lean towards one or the other?

Anyways, I absolutely adore what I do and if I had the option to be in any other profession, I would stay put right here. But I would try to find a way to be a Zoologist on the side.

✨ Skills

Guitar

I'm still going strong with the guitar and I'm loving the journey so far. Music is such a gigantic part of my life that it's something that I look forward to doing on a daily basis. There's not some huge aspirations I'm chasing with this, I just want to be able to play some songs for people and do something different than my usual activities.

This past year was the most progress I've made for sure. If I had to guess, the biggest reason for this is because I've finally learned to let go of the idea that I needed to play every note and song perfectly. I'm feeling much relaxed and ironically, feeling more confident now that I'm not trying to play without flaws.

Music is perfect the way it is.

Front-end

Some projects I've been apart of this past year have pushed me to improve my front-end coding skills. I'm basically still going all in on JavaScript and I plan to continue that for the foreseeable future.

On another note, I feel like I've been completely out of the loop on industry news. I'm a frequent visitor of CSS Tricks and I alluded to this earlier in this post but it feels impossible to stay up-to-date in both the design world and the development world.

Balance improving both

Another year passed where I don't know how to get better at both design and development. Or maybe I'm just not noticing my improvements in both. It seems that I'm either getting better at design as a whole and my development skills fade or I'm getting better at development and my design skills fade.

🧞 Self Reflection

Reading

I read every night and it's always something I look forward to. I read 30-ish books this past year (mostly fiction) and a vast majority of them were fantastic. I'm a sucker for a great story and an even bigger sucker for great characters. There have been a few books that I put off from reading this year so that I could read some less-popular options. Also because they're massive and intimidating. I plan on reading those next year though. If you're curious:

• Shogun by James Clavell
• The Stormlight Archive by Brandon Sanderson
• The Mistborn Trilogy by Brandon Sanderson

How I feel

I feel grateful.

I'm a hard worker and I have a high standard for myself. That said, it would be foolish of me to think some luck didn't play in my favor. I'm lucky to be alive in this time of general opulence. I'm very far from being rich but I'm eternally grateful for what I have.

🎭 2022 Goal Review

Enough with the sappy stuff, let's see if I actually accomplished any of the goals that I said I wanted to do in last year's review.

• ✅ Be more present. I'm giving myself a green check on this one. Overall, I worried a lot less last year and felt that I appreciated the moments much more. I feel lucky to be alive and even luckier to have the people in my life that I do.
• ✅ Grow as a UX professional. This is super vague but I believe I accomplished this one. I grew as a front-end developer, I dabbled in front-end unit testing and learned a lot more about user interviews and the CI/CD process.
• ✅ Read more. See "Reading" above.
• ❌ Create more. This was a massive fail. I didn't create nearly enough of really anything. On that note though, I did post two blogs that I'm proud of:
  • Jakob’s Law and How To Use It
  • Practical Advice For Non-Designers, Part One: User Experience
• 🤷🏾 Consume less. Not sure. I spent a lot of time on my devices but an equal amount of time in my head. Regarding reading, that's a good kind of consumption right?

🎯 Goals for 2023

Continue to build healthy habits

I've done an okay job of building some healthy habits this past year but there are few that I've been struggling to hammer home. These are the habits that I am going to build next year:

• Waking up early (5 AM would be ideal)
• Fasting 16 hours per day, minimum
• Writing at least 500 words per day in any format
• Mediate a few times per week

Diversify my income

It's crazy to think that if I lost my job for whatever reason, almost all of my income would be out the window. This is something I've known and thought about for a while but this past year, it kind of lit a fire under me. This next year, I want to find other avenues of generating income.

::note If my employer happens to read this, I love my job and I don't plan on quitting. ::

I've freelanced off and on for years now. Never in an official capacity but I've been open to helping out friends or friends of friends. Towards the end of this year, I've started to get more serious about having a legit side hustle and freelancing is going to be it. My full-time job and my hobbies are going to take priority over freelancing but it'd be good to get some extra projects in when I can.

Spanish

I'm also going to attempt to learn Spanish next year. With so many people on this planet that speak so many different languages, I almost feel ashamed that I can only speak English (and barely even that).

🎬 Conclusion

Over the past 365 days, I've build on a lot of my core skills, did a good amount of reading and found out that my physical limits can be pushed pretty far.

I'm hoping 2023 will be as great, if not better than 2022. I have a feeling that it will be. I'm a firm believer in putting things out into the universe. In my experience, the universe has a way of giving you what you want.

Cheers to everyone. Take a look at this amazing video I found.

Can you imagine being in the crowd during this performance? Just incredible.

Until next time.