It’s January, so it’s time to look both at the past and at the future! Here’s some good stuff that happened to me in 2017:
- I finally graduated as a BSc in mathematics and made good progress towards graduating as a MSc.
- I had a relaxing summer vacation that included hiking and sailing.
- I attended ICFP. I’ve wanted to go there for ages and finally had the chance. It was the most interesting conference I’ve been to.
- In the fall, I started practicing ashtanga yoga. It turned out to be a good combination of exercise and light meditation.
My thinking about software development evolved in small but important ways:
- Nowadays I’m more concerned about whether our team does good work than whether I do good work personally. Might be a sign of maturing as an engineer.
- I no longer care about Haskell. Being a Haskell programmer used to be a part of my ego, but it’s time to admit that I don’t find Haskell interesting anymore. ICFP made this clear. I’m over being a <programming language X> person.
Here’s what I hope 2018 will bring along:
- More good things: graduating as a MSc, more hiking, sailing, and yoga! More time outdoors!
- I’d like to figure out how to publish writing regularly and sustainably. Blogging every week didn’t work for me, so I stopped it. I did continue to write, but I didn’t publish anything – that wasn’t useful either.
- In general, it’d be cool to ship more things. I’ve always been good at understanding things, but it’s not useful unless you somehow reflect that understanding back to the world.
I enjoyed some things in 2017:
- The best book I read was Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. It covers universal themes like love, marriage, death of a loved one, and birth of a children. I felt that Tolstoy did a good job describing how differently various characters feel about the same events. I recommend it to everyone!
- Good Life Coffee’s Kayon Mountain was excellent, we drank a lot of it at the office.
- Umami, the sushi place in Tampereen kauppahalli, is great! I’m not a sushi connoisseur, but it’s the best sushi I’ve had in Finland.
Finally, I can’t believe it’s 2018 and Juha Sipilä’s cabinet still hasn’t fallen apart.