Mario Carrion
Three years ago I planned to use this retrospective to look back and analyze all the improvements, or the lack thereof, of the previous three years and more importantly review what went wrong and plan the future ahead.
Before that, let’s start with what actually happened last year.
2020, personally
I’m thankful 2020 is finally over, it’s clear it wasn’t good a year for anybody, there were a lot of crazy things happening around the world, around the country and around our city; but not everything was bad, I had some fun times and some great things were accomplished both personally and professionally.
The truth is that the beginning of the year, February to be precise, was great because we took a well deserved vacation and we were able to travel to Florida to our first ever Spring Training, we watched a couple of games, we explored Port St. Lucie and in the end we made some really nice memories.
Then the pandemic hit here in New York City, the first epicenter in the US, things started to change really quickly, we noticed it at our supermarket, we saw people panic-buying, shelves were empty; then New York on PAUSE happened and non essential stores closed.
It was concerning.
Being this the first pandemic I’ve experienced in my lifetime I was worried.
I hope we all make it, I really do. I've been following this since January and I never thought we were ready anyways but still we can make a difference.
— Mario Carrion (@mariocarrion) March 15, 2020
NYC slowly started to get better and a phased reopen initiated, but then another things happened: massive protests and sadly… looting, it was bad again. Manhattan became a ghost town and some areas of the other boroughs were also impacted by looters, stores boarded up to avoid having more loses, and to make things more complicated it was election year.
I don’t know if it was because of the weather or because people started to be more careful but cases went down and we had a tiny bit of normalcy for a few months, we were able to explore the city, enjoy outdoor dinning and have a bit of fun, however starting with Thanksgiving, and the beginning of the cold weather, the cases started to go up:
Today's update on the numbers:
— Archive: Governor Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) November 26, 2020
Of the 217,721 tests reported yesterday, 6,933 were positive (3.18% of total).
Total hospitalizations are at 3,056.
Sadly, there were 67 COVID fatalities yesterday. pic.twitter.com/N79qVCn0Mm
and to date it looks like it is going to be another Spring all over again.
Today's update on the numbers:
— Archive: Governor Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) January 3, 2021
Total COVID hospitalizations are at 7,963.
Of the 142,345 tests reported yesterday, 11,368 were positive (7.98% of total).
Sadly, there were 138 fatalities. pic.twitter.com/WxVLBYOdnA
We’ll see what happens next but I’m so happy 2020 is gone.
2020, plans
Last year I planned to achieve three goals:
Continue what I started 4 years ago!,
Safe to say this is a never-ending recurrent goal.
Consume at least 300 technical resources,
This is a bit hard to quantify, I know for sure I consumed a lot of technical content last year, how much? I have no idea, all I know is that on average I attended, at least, two O’Reilly Live Training Talks weekly; not to mention all the Youtube videos and GopherCon 2020.
Continue working on Open Source: start a new one project, complete swagger-lint and upgrade nit.
swagger-lint was successfully released and it’s already in production! I didn’t have time to work on
nit, and I didn’t quite start a new open source project but I did start a new project, which will be my focus this year: my technical YouTube channel.
2017-2019
2017, 2018 and 2019 are forever gone.
I don’t think I accomplished what I wanted to, and that’s fine, all of this indicates I need to work even harder, I need to hustle, make the best of my free time to produce useful new content, learn new things, become a better person and enjoy life. It is inspirational.
I’m looking forward to reading 2024: In restrospective.