2022 In Reflections

It's almost the end of the first month of 2023. Last year was an interesting year for me. I have had some highs and lows, but overall it's been a memorable journey. It has been a while since I have written a blog post on my blog with my reflections. I like to look back on my life in 2022 to see what has happened and, like everyone else, try to come up with a resolution for a better 2023. These are some of my main highlights throughout 2022.

Travel post-pandemic

After two years of being in isolation due to the Covid-19 pandemic, I was finally able to travel overseas again! I traveled to visit my family in Indonesia. It has been 5 years since the last time I visited Indonesia after moving to Melbourne. My son, who was 4.5 years old at the time, hadn't been to Indonesia since he was born. That trip was a memorable experience for him. It was still in the early days of Covid eradication, therefore we still needed to experience the quarantine phase. My trip ended up being extended by a month because we're contracting Covid-19 and I needed to work from Indonesia (which is not a terrible experience, with the timezone difference and everything, but I won't do it for long)

My Web3 Journey

2022 was also the year that I lost money from my crypto "gambling". Unless you've been hiding under the rocks, you must have heard "cryptocurrencies" in the mainstream media all around the world. Over the past 2 years, I've been "investing" in crypto, and as some of you may know, April 2022 was the month when Bitcoin hit the bottom and all altcoins followed. Including my biggest bag at that time (Terra Luna). It was devastating at that time, however, I learned a valuable lesson about the importance of diversifying my investments and not putting all my eggs in one basket. From this experience, I decided to be more cautious about my crypto investment and start putting back some funds into less risky assets such as ETFs.

Despite my crypto investment loss, I still believe that blockchain technology, web3 technology, and crypto technology are here to stay. That's what made me continue to learn and build in that space. In 2022, along with some of my friends, I managed to help launch two successful NFT projects. It's been an enjoyable experience to get involved within the NFT community on the project that I worked on and learn more about web development for web3 projects.

My work at CultureAmp

Professionally, last year was a full-on experience for my career as a software engineer. It was the year that marked my transition from a full-stack engineer into a full-time front-end developer at CultureAmp. Previously, I'd been working back and forth between doing Rails API and React app development.

One of my goals for 2022 was to improve my skills as a front-end engineer. I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to work on a greenfield project that focused solely on front-end development. I was part of two major projects that improved the usability and functionality of the CultureAmp platform on the Goals module. I was responsible for building a goal visualization and extracting part of the monolith codebase into a new micro frontend.

To further my growth as a frontend engineer, I completed the EpicReact dev course by Kent C Doods and did Frontend Master Typescript training. These courses helped me to develop a deep understanding of React applications with Typescript and to become a more fluent front-end engineer.

In addition, December 2022 marked my 5 year anniversary at CultureAmp. This is the longest I've stayed at one company, and I am still proud to be a part of the values the company strives to spread.

2023 and beyond

A lot of things happened in 2022. There are things that I am proud of and there are things that I hate. I didn't set any resolutions at the start of last year. In 2023, to make myself accountable I'll try something different by setting up a resolution and trying to challenge myself with something that I haven't done before. On my way to achieving that resolution, I will post my progress every month these are things that I'll commit to myself by the end of 2023:

• Finish reading and reviewing 12 books (either technical or non-fiction)
• Write 12 technical blogpost
• Create a new youtube channel and produce 5 tutorial videos
• Become a staff engineer
• Lost 10kgs

Overall, 2022 was a year of growth, challenge, and learning. We are at the beginning of a post-pandemic world. With all of the uncertainty that may occur in 2023, I'm looking forward to a better myself in this new year.