I grew up in the southern part of India and one of the things I loved doing the most at the end of the year was reading through the year-end summaries that the newspaper “The Hindu” published. It was a summary of the important events for every day of the year with some articles written by the top newsmakers of the year. This blog post is my attempt to do the same about how I did during 2021. 2021 was quite a year for me! At work:

  • I got a pretty bad rating at my annual performance review towards the beginning of the year. It is not that I hate my job, I was feeling down and I was not able to focus on delivering projects. One particular one that I worked on in the last year took 3 months to complete, far in excess of what I hoped it would take.
  • The rest of the year was just me brute-forcing attempts to get my job done. I have since been able to take over the ownership of the integrations pipeline that runs in more than 70 AWS clusters and have been working at automating the whole process. I was able to collect better data on the functioning of the pipeline, particularly the failures and got to work with our partner teams on making it better. My reviews towards the end of the year from my manager have been positive.
  • I postponed taking the CKA certification multiple times until the deadline in October 2021, when I had to eventually cancel it. The moral of this one being that you should never pay to register for a certification as a new year resolution. Not only will you not complete the resolution even after two years of setting it, you will also end up losing money.
  • I was approached by some companies for engineering roles, mostly startups and all of them said ’no’ after I an interview with the hiring manager. This is mostly due to the fact that although I am a senior engineer in my current role, I do not have any significant design or project leadership experience that they want.
  • As always, I signed up for more courses and got more books than I could handle in 2021. I still have not gotten past Chapter 1 of the “Designing Data Intensive Applications” book that I desperately want to finish reading. The courses that I signed up for include a couple of AWS Systems courses, courses on Terraform, a course for the CKA exam, and a Python RegEx course on Udemy.
  • Working in the current conditions (COVID and the whole remote work) is a significant cause of burnout. There have been times in the past year where I have felt overwhelmed or bad about work. It has mostly revolved around having to do some tasks repetitively due to failures with the Spinnaker pipeline or a particularly bad oncall week, but I can still say that I do not feel burnt out. I feel that it is absolutely essential that we take care of ourselves and take as much time as everyone needs to recharge if we feel bad. It is also helpful if managers and mentors keep an eye out for signs of employee burnout and take appropriate steps to ease their workload. Personal:
  • When the COVID case numbers started easing down, we were able to finally go on our honeymoon (I got married in 2019). We travelled to Hawaii and spent a week in Maui.
  • Apart from the Hawaii trip, my wife and I also traveled to Chicago, Cleveland, Boston, Vermont, and New Orleans last year.
  • My wife and I were able to save up to 69% of what we earned this year. The credit for this goes to my wife. The Shape acquisition in 2020 and the subsequent exercising of my options created a huge tax bill in 2021. This was further complicated by the fact that I got a W2 from Shape and 3 corrections following that, including one that I received the day after I filed my taxes for 2020, forcing me to file an amendment. To top this, my wife and I together had 3 W2s for 2020 and we had to file taxes in two different states (CA and NY), as we moved in 2020. I had significant tax preparation expenses in 2021.

To quote Charles Dickens,

It was the best of times,

It was the worst of times.

This pretty much sums up my experience of 2021. I am fortunate enough to have a job during this whole pandemic, a job pays me decently and lets me work remotely. I am grateful for my wife, and I am happy that I get to be with her (the alternative would be that I would work in California while she works in NY state). I would like to wish the reader a Happy New Year for 2022. I hope to do better and be more thankful this year.