“Why am I not in the US of A right now?” Good question. That’s what my dad asked me when he congratulated me on my 21st birthday this past October 1st.

Not being in the US this Thursday evening for academic reasons, I spent Wednesday night with my roommates grabbing a few exotic beers at our local pub. The past week has been heavy with assignments and a midterm already, which is why this post has been delayed – but enough with the excuses!

Some of the achievements or big changes that have occurred since my last birthday have been the following:

• Visited and vacationed in the USA for the first time
• Moved into a new (and nicer) house with my roommates
• Became a happier person through mindfulness
• Expanded my beer and wine taste

This past year I’ve also been working on a bunch of small projects, some of them I’ve been actively working on, others I haven’t. I’ve pressed 3,139,757 keys and 769,532 mouse clicks, made 310 contributions to repos on my GitHub, read 5 books, and am still reading 6 books.

I’m more than half-way through my Computer Science program at Carleton. 3.5 years in and I’ve got less than a year and a half to go. It gets more exciting as the topics I’m studying get more advanced and interesting. I’m looking forward to finishing and starting my full-time career.

I must have read a countless number of articles; pretty much every day covering topics from Docker, continuous delivery, microservices, distributed systems, coding, and programming languages. I’m amazed at how much I’ve read and how I apply it to my work and experiment.

This year I really want to make drastic improvements to the operations side of my job at ZDirect, learn Go, Ruby and Coffeescript (in that order), become more mindful, and get into shape (because keyboard arms aren’t sexy).