My friends half-jokingly call it my quarter-century birthday. This year I’m a day late, and according to previous posts, sick again at this same time of year surprisingly. It may have been from the surprise birthday party my friends threw. Oh well, lets get on with the show.

It’s always hard to remember back to what October of last year was like, especially after a year like this. Around November of 2018 I had a wonderful surprise promotion: becoming my own team’s manager. With that came a whole new challenge of understanding people instead of just software. I was thrown in the deep end one day and had to figure out what managing people was all about. From talking with colleagues to reading books, I performed a lot of research over the past year to understand what it means to manage people, especially as a manager of a development team.

Besides career-related achievements, I also had the great opportunity to vacation in Mexico and New York with a bunch of my close buddies, and to partake in a few extra ski trips over the winter to Mont Tremblant and Camp Fortune. I surprised myself with my skiing skills – I must not have gone very recently. Over the summer a number of visits to the cottage was made, one of the times with a bunch of good friends.

Something I wasn’t expecting to have happened at all was to get my SSI Open Water Diving certification. This allows me to go scuba diving to maximum depths of 60 ft. A friend of mine suggested the idea to a few of us and we all had nothing to lose, so why not! Five pool dive sessions, three classroom sessions, and four dives at Morrison’s Quarry over a weekend gave the three of us the ability to travel anywhere around the world and go diving. It was a great learning experience as we had excellent instructors and one on one training as luck would have it. The three of us will be planning a diving trip in the new year!

This was the year where more weddings made it my way. One of them was for my longtime cottage neighbour who is around my age, and another wedding was for my Aunt. Both were vastly different weddings, but both were very enjoyable.

In late fall and early spring there’s a large period of time where bad weather holds me back from going running and cycling in the summertime, or skating on the canal in the wintertime. To keep myself active I bought myself an indoor trainer for my road bike. I was able to train indoors a few times a week pretty consistently over the winter. Keeping this training up for all of the cold months allowed me to jump on my bike in the spring and not miss a beat.

Here’s a few interesting stats of mine from the past year:

• 57 hours of running/cycling/training, 1220 km total
• 14 articles for this blog written, 7 published
• 7 books read – the either being In The Plex, or the Elon Musk biography
• 1932 GitHub contributions from work and personal projects

🍻 to another year!