2020

Hello 2020

As I step into the new decade, I want to spend some time reflecting the past year and setting goals for this year.

2019 Reflections

2019 went by extremely quickly, and has been an important milestone year.

Switching Jobs

I took a giant leap leaving Facebook to work at a startup (Roam Analytics). Despite the many resulting challenges and setbacks at Roam, I am proud to say that I made the right decision, and was able to learn and mature rapidly. This decision also allowed me to introspect my identity, values and passions, that would have otherwise been masked in the comfort zone at Facebook. I appreciated the adage learning by doing and became observant on the importance of various components (engineering, product, design, commercial, leadership) required for successful execution in a startup.

Open-source Projects

I successfully shipped react-globe, react-wordcloud as complete projects that I intend to maintain in the future. As part of building these projects, I worked on developing an efficient way to build future projects with progressive documentation and reusable setup and patterns.

Relaxing

I made a lot of progress on learning how to relax and enjoy events in the present without constantly worrying about future events. I found a new hobby through landscaping and gardening, and is something I will definitely maintain in the future.

Reading

I used to read a lot when I was a child and almost completely stopped reading after college. In 2019, I set an aggressive goal to read my entire collection of books but I was only able to read around 25% (15) of my collection.

Exercising

I maintained some amount of exercise (cardio, hit workouts) during the year. I was not too happy that I did not develop a discipline and habit of exercising daily.

2020 Resolutions

These resolutions in 2020 aim to establish a new set of habits and discipline that should prove beneficial in the long term. They are intentionally chosen so that I cannot logically refute the positive outcomes they offer in the future years.

Better Sleep

I have never really slept well in my life. I average around 6-7 hours of sleep peppered with disruptions. After reading the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, I firmly believe in the importance of sleep (and was able to confirm its importance with my personal experience). I aim to establish a healthy sleep schedule, and look forward to removing the alarm clock out of my life! This personally sounds impossible since I am a heavy alarm clock snoozer but I am willing to give this a shot in 2020.

Consistent Exercise

Consistent exericise and good sleep complement each other. I will keep a cadence with my sleep schedule and exercise in the mornings. Both goals involve maintaining discipline and shaking up old habits, and I look forward to challenging myself to developing improving my lifestyle.

More Reading

Despite missing my original goal in 2019 to read my collection, I appreciated the importance of reading to continue to acquire knowledge through diverse sources. I will continue to read throughout 2020, and keep the background goal of reading my collection of books. In addition, I plan to summarize and review the books I have read to solidify my understanding and opinions about them.

Open Source Projects

I have and continue to be interested in projects that focus on simplifying workflows with data. With the foundation in 2019 and firm knowledge of modern web tools (react, gatsby, graphql), I look forward to building out at least two larger open-source projects that I hope can provide free, open, and simple solutions in the data visualization and analytics space.

Landscaping

In 2019, I completed landscaping of my frontyard all by myself. I felt a huge sense of accomplishment and learned to appreciate that the fruit of one's labor sometimes bear slowly and incrementally. Landscaping is a meditative activity for me, and made me reflect a lot of deep lessons in life. In 2020, I plan to continue improving the land in my sidewalks and backyard. Part of the goal is to enjoy the moment of the labor and projects without worrying about the timing and details of the outcome.