My 2021 in review

It’s not easy for me to describe how my 2021 went: it wasn’t a particularly good year nor was it a particularly bad year. But it also wasn’t exactly an average year either. A lot of things happened!

Crossing off items from a bucket list can be a challenge in any year, but it’s particularly hard in a year with numerous lockdowns and travel restrictions.

Still, I managed to cross off a few of them:

• Any organisation in the Netherlands that has 50 or more employees is legally required to have a works council: a small group of elected people that represents all workers in the organisation and regularly meets with the board of directors.

  I originally wanted to run for a position in the works council at one of my previous employers, but I wasn’t eligible for candidacy yet. And shortly after that there was that thing where I left my boss. This year it finally happened, and it’s made for an… interesting year.

• I bought a car (side note: You can probably guess which one it is from the header image if you’re at least somewhat familiar with European car brands.) in the summer. The first place I drove it to was an otherwise fairly hard-to-reach plane spotting location near the distant Polderbaan runway at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. It was okay.

• I started a Star Trek viewing marathon a few days before I my first week at the NOS. It took me well over two years to watch everything from The Original Series (1966) to Lower Decks (2020). For a brief period I was able to claim that I had watched all Star Trek movies and series in existence, but then they released new episodes. Ah well, you won’t hear me complaining!

• The “challenge” of watching all episodes of Friends pales in comparison to the Star Trek marathon. What makes this bucket list item special though, is that it was one of the oldest items on my list: I put it on the list in 2004, which means that this particular item was getting pretty close to the legal drinking age in the Netherlands.

If you look in the archive section of this website you’d probably assume that 2020 wasn’t a very productive year for me. It’s not that nothing happened that year: I simply spent very little time writing blog posts.

I resolved to write more this year. And write more I did! The number of articles and illustrations on this website grew by at least 88% (side note: There are a few work-related pages that are hidden from the archive. Some of them are quite popular, but I have no idea why.), and so did the number of visits and kind messages.

In addition to blog posts, I also produced a few small client-side and back-end applications. Most of these applications run on a small Kubernetes cluster that has proven to be fairly stable as long as I don’t touch my Terraform scripts.