Best of 2022

A few favorite things from 2022, in no particular order 🙂.

Travel

I felt some intense stir-craziness after not getting much of a change in scenery during the early pandemic years and have been grateful to have been able to travel so much this year.

Some friends and I went on a road trip to Joshua Tree and another to Bryce Canyon and Zion. In July, another group of friends and I spent 4 days camping on the playa in the Alvord Desert.

My dad and I went on several bike trips, including the Banks-Vernonia Trail and the Trail of the Couer d’Alenes, in Idaho.

In the fall, my girlfriend and I did a road trip to Banff, visited some good friends of hers in Denver, and spent 11 days in Costa Rica. I also went to a conference for work in Los Angeles.

In between, I’ve made several trips during the week to Bend to work from there and visit family, which has been really nice.

Books

I read 47 books this year, totalling 14,368 pages. That’s an increase of 2,726 pages and 7 books over last year, with the caveat that several were audiobooks and I spent a lot of time on the road 🙂.

Some favorites were:

• Chip War
• Skeptic’s Guide to the Future
• An Immense World
• Fuzz
• Arriving Today
• Humble Pi
• The Code Book
• Lab Girl
• Skeptic’s Guide to the Future
• Blood, Sweat, and Pixels
• Book of Eels
• Ministry for the Future

I also read a couple technical books in my field that I enjoyed:

• Designing Event-Driven Systems by Ben Stopford
• Staff Engineer
• Unix: A history and a Memoir

Audiobooks

I listened to 16,487 minutes (11.44 days) of Audible books, which is an average of 45 min per day. That’s almost exactly how much I listened to in 2021 (16,878 min), so points for consistency!

Apparently I had a “marathon session” of 455 min on August 25, which lines up to a solo drive I took to meet some friends to camp at Diamond Lake, about 5 hours away.

Podcasts

• Ezra Klein
• Michael Shermer
• 99% Invisible
• The Daily
• Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe
• Security Now

Games

Video games

I finally picked up a PS5 this year and have been immensely enjoying that. But I also played several Switch games.

PS5 favorites:

• Returnal
• Horizon: Forbidden West
• A Plague Tale (both Innocence and Requiem)
• Deliver Us the Moon
• Stray
• God of War
• CyberPunk 2077. Yes, unpopular opinion but I actually liked it.

(I played a lot of Horizon when I had COVID)

Switch favorites:

• Astroneer
• SpiritFarer
• Portal 1 and 2
• Hades
• Gris
• Ori: Will of the Wisps
• Celeste
• Railbound

iOS:

• Automatoys

Tabletop games

My coworkers and I used to have a weekly in-person board game night before COVID and we rebooted that in the fall. It’s been fun to play more of those.

Some favorites have been:

• Cascadia
• The Mind
• Wingspan

Movies

• Alpinist
• CODA
• Minari
• In Silico
• Samsara
• Drive My Car
• Everything Everywhere All at Once
• Weird: The Al Yankovic Story

TV

• White Lotus
• Love, Death, and Robots
• Tehran
• Yellowjackets
• Under the Banner of Heaven
• The Outlaws
• Couples Therapy
• Russian Doll
• Alone
• For All Mankind

Projects

I bought my mom a FastFoto bulk photo scanner, and we digitized all of our old photos. It feels really good to finally have that completed. I know it’s been something my mom has been wanting to do for years, and it’s been fun to revisit those memories.

I migrated all of my home automation stuff to Home Assistant. I was using a cobbled mix of IFTTT, Google Home, and the Hue app before. I don’t know why I didn’t try HASS sooner, it’s an awesome ecosystem. I built a network of Aqara Zigbee sensors around the house, added alerts for if I left the garage or front door open, added a “vacation” mode which pauses the Roomba schedule and lowers the HVAC, etc. I’ll write a whole separate post on that.

I made my way through previous years’ Advent of Code problems. I’m up to 217 total stars now, meaning I’ve solved almost 110 out of 200 problems. I’m hoping to solve the remaining ones in the next year. One thing I’ve done differently this time around is to consolidate my helper code into its own library so it’s really easy to reuse, and so I can share it with coworkers who are also working through the problems.

I got my new work laptop, which motivated me to do an overhaul of my dotfiles. I settled on a setup that uses stow to manage the configs and Homebrew to install the dependencies. I also added include yabai and skhd for automating window management and hotkeys. I’m really happy with those.

What’s next

I’m on my 6th year at Vevo and am eligible for a one-month sabbatical. I’m planning on going to either Europe or Southeast Asia in the spring and am very excited to start planning that.

I’ve been lurking in /r/homelab for a little while and would like to start building one out. I’ll likely start with a NAS, a UPS, and some basic networking gear. Long-term, I’ll migrate my Home Assistant to a beefier machine and may even spin up a small Kubernetes cluster.