2023 in Review
Not going to lie, this was a challenging year. There were certainly some high points, but also quite a fair bit of stress and change and uncertainty running throughout. It’s the year my husband and I finally got COVID—but it’s also the year I get to call him my husband! Let’s go to the highlight reel.
Experienced
Rahul and I got married twice, on two continents! Once for extended family in the United States, and then again for the extended family in India. We were blown away by how many of our friends (and my family members) were able to fly across the world to celebrate with us again. Dance parties across the globe.
6 months later, we went to Italy for our honeymoon and had a wonderful time evening out 20k steps a day with carbs and amaro.
Smaller experiences that brought me joy this year:
- Monthly book club with a group of friends
- Visiting family
- Cabin weekends
- Live outdoor music (even though I’m pretty sure I got COVID from an outdoor music fest)
- My first pen show, the inaugural PNW Pen Show in PDX!
- Parallel play, particularly finding crafty groups in Seattle to share time with
- Having friends over for a double-spooky-movie feature around Halloween, and for drinks and candle lighting at Diwali
- Doing a lot of writing and drawing in my journal; I feel really happy with how cute it is, and I think it will be fun to look back on in the future.
Shipped
With my collaborators at Netlify, I shipped:
- Collaboration through the Netlify Drawer on branch deploys, as well as a refresh of said Drawer
- Collaborative Deploy Previews with Bitbucket repos
- Bulk import for environment variables
- Automatic Deploy Subdomains
- Form notification subject line customizations
- A series of updates improving navigation and information architecture in the app
- Netlify app for Slack
- Some bits and bobs behind the scenes on Netlify’s composition platform…stay tuned for more next year!
Learned
- Continuous Discovery Habits was my favorite product read this year!
- Quite a bit about data analysis, statistics, and SQL. I know enough to be dangerous and to have way too much fun.
- A few months’ on Duolingo worth of Italian. I switched back to Spanish when I got home from Italy, but abandoned the app a couple months later (again). It bothers me to have engagement-hacking change my behaviors. So I’m back on Wanikani, learning kanji again; their spaced repetition system is so much gentler. I also learned about the “comprehensible input” style of language learning, which I might try for Spanish (there is a well-known site called Dreaming Spanish).
Made
- In Q1: a journal cover, bookmarks for my bridal party, and finalizing a scarf for my husband
- A couple small pen pouches
- A product resources website
- A zippered marker pouch
- A small tapestry weaving
- Lots of “digital gardening” on my existing sites
- Finished my Stillman & Birn Epsilon A5-ish sketchbook
Favorite Media
Books
Sooooo I read ~76~ 80 books this year, which officially makes this my biggest reading year ever. 📚 My previous “personal best” was 72 books. What probably heavily attributed to this year’s volume (heh) was 1) the Seattle Public Library Summer Book Bingo, 2) readathons, and 3) my friends’ monthly book club.
Favorite books of the year here! “VenCo” by Cherie Dimaline was absolutely my favorite read of the year: a perfect witchy book.
Music
As you can quickly surmise from my 2023 top songs on Tidal, I pretty much just listened to the boygenius record over and over again.
Movies
38 movies watched. I wasn’t blown away by anything this year, really. Got spoiled last year with “Everything Everywhere All at Once”. A few favorites in the 4–5 star range:
- Barbie
- The Godfather
- M3gan (wow, can’t believe that was this year)
- See How They Run
- Talk to Me
🥂 Cheers to 2024
What a beautiful, base-4-number of a year. I hope life treats us all well in the days to come.
