Wrapping Up the Year

What a year.

I started out the year thinking it would be “business as usual.” Boy was I wrong. 2023 was full of change, challenges, and serveral ups and downs.

We started out the year with a trip to San Diego and LegoLand.

It was a great trip. LegoLand is definitely geared towards much younger kids, but we didn’t care. Everyone loves Lego, and the models we saw were really cool.

But things got a lot more hectic on the work front. In March, I was asked to take on additional responsibilities at work and merge the Education and Documentation teams together. People liked where the educational content my team created and wanted to see that extend into what we do with our other technical content. I spent the next several months learning how the documenation process worked and figuring out how to take two teams and turn them into one. As a result of the merger, my direct reports doubled, and the responsibility and scope of the role nearly tripled. Documentation is essential to product development, and my team needed to be involved in documenting several new features.

In July I caught some kind of virus and had the worst sore throat of my life, along with a terrible cough. None of the COVID tests were positive, and there were no signs of other infections, so I spent most of August feeling pretty miserable.

But work wasn’t letting up; a few people moved on, leaving us short staffed. My amazing team was able to keep moving forward, and I jumped in over the summer to create and deliver a course to a live audience in September.

It was the first class I’ve taught in person since 2016. It felt good to do that again, but it was a ton of work and I don’t plan to do too much ore of that for a while.

But on the way back, I finally caught COVID, which I then shared with the family. We spent the middle of September feeling pretty awful. Two back-to-back illnesses in a row took its toll on me; I spent almost a month and a half sick with acute symptoms, and it wasn’t until October that I really started feeling like myself again.

Due to some poor decisions made by people who owned this house before, and the contractors who worked on it, the deck was sinking and we had some negative grading that needed fixing. So this fall we had our yard landscaped, our driveway redone, and our deck re-built.

When they demolished the deck, we discovered that the deck had no footings.

We also got a new cat. He joined our family in the summer.

Santa is the name he got from the shelter, and since Carissa loves Christmas, she kept the name.

And in December, I delivered my first conference talk in five years.

There are a few interesting things on deck for 2024. I’m writing a new book, and I’m editing a few others. And there will be new challenges at work too.