It’s hard to come up with the content for this post while fending off a sickness, but I know it’s a yearly ceremony for myself to look back and reflect on the prior year. As always, what better of a time to do this than on my Birthday!

One word can really describe my primary focus over the past year: Career. This time last year I was just about to pass the 90 day mark at Shopify.

Whether it’s been building close and trustworthy friendships with teammates and other colleagues, levelling up new hires through mentoring, or continually delivering impactful work – this year has been nothing more than exemplary.

Let’s get right into things! Since this time last year I moved to downtown Ottawa and am now living without roommates. Crazy to think that it only happened 10 months ago since it feels like forever, but I am enjoying all the perks of having no roommates and downtown life.

This summer was one of my most active to date. There was always something going on during the week or weekend from July straight through August. I had the opportunity to travel with a friend to his home town of Fredericton, New Brunswick. For the first time being on the east-coast I was expecting an east-coast accent out of everyone, but the place seemed more like Ontario than not. It was a great time hanging out with his friends and attending a party at the local hotel.

I had a great time with friends at two music festivals: Bluesfest and Escapade. Escapade was especially fun since there was a number of great acts: Alesso, Tchami, Zedd, and Kaskade. One private festival I went to was about 15 people camping at a buddies lakeside property in Quebec. A DJ booth was set up and the trance music was going on late into the night.

Another bunch of cool moments were centred around exploring other Shopify offices. Barrel Hall in Waterloo was the coolest looking since it was once a distillery. It still has all of the characteristic aging barrels and wooden structure. Montreal’s office has the best artwork and looks like the most liveable city. Toronto’s offices and the city in general was a grand party since it’s mostly new to me, but I have friends, family, and colleagues everywhere.

Even though I didn’t do as much cycling as last year, this year I took advantage of Ottawa’s Sunday Bikedays. On Sundays throughout the summer certain parkways were closed for the morning. This allowed for coasting down some long stretches of smooth roadway. The midpoint for some of these outings were spent taking a break at a local brewpub. Some friends joined me every once in a while too!

Investing and personal finance has become a hobby of mine and ever more important as I get older. It’s better earlier than later to learn about the do’s and don’ts of personal finance. A year of listening to related podcasts, plenty of reading, and managing my savings has enabled me to go from zero to pretty competent. I’m lucky to have a representative group of people to bounce ideas and plans off of.

I went to my first conference, BSides Ottawa, which was quite fun. I met a number of colleagues and played in my first capture the flag event. I found out that I can defend, but am not too good at attacking. I’ll try again to attend this year!

December was when myself and a few others started a rewrite for Shopify’s Help Centre. Unknown to us, there was quite a lot of feature creep – either from “that one little feature that’s existed forever”, to adding multiple language support. This resulted in the project taking seven months, but we’re glad to have done it. Throughout the process we started and built our own kick-ass team. When the rewrite shipped it went off without a hitch! 🎇 Now all of our current projects hinge off of the benefits that this rewrite brought.

I attended a few training sessions that should benefit my career – Visualizing Software Architecture with the C4 Model, as well as Agile Scrum training. The latter has definitely transformed my team for the better.

There was a lot of various work events – planned or unplanned, official or unofficial – which I’m pretty grateful to have experienced with friends and colleagues. Alas, there are too many to mention.

Here’s to another year of learning, growth, exploration, and good times.