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As I reflect on 2022, it was a really dense year.

Russian invasion on Ukraine

In 2022 Russia, invaded the Ukraine. I’m still in shock that in the 21st century things like that can happen in East Europe. As we tried to help, we hosted an Ukrainian family that was impacted by the Russian aggression. This made me reflect on the geo-political situation that we’re in. I was able to zoom out a bit reading pieces like Taleb’s A Clash of Two Systems. I also resigned from being MVP due to a vague, close to none, response from Microsoft. Unfortunately, till this day when I discuss the topic of invasion with Ukrainians, it’s still an open wound. I hope that the invader will be defeated soon.

JS ecosystem

2022 allowed me to dive deeper into JS ecosystem. I must admit that there’s something in it that .NET efforts, mostly led by Microsoft with Dotnet , still lack. Its openness and ability to evolve fast is amazing. I’m following it mostly from the point of the edge/serverless. Efforts like Web-interoperable Runtimes Community Group, where they fix a lot of flaws and provide even better foundation for future development, are how the tech should be evolved. Or should be let to be evolved. Of course language/framework-wise, there’s WASM with its WASM edge that will allow different languages to be run on the edge. Still, builder-culture like, there’s something interesting about JS world.

Books

As usual, I reviewed all the books that I read using GoodReads. I stopped myself a few times from adding a book to Want to Read shelve as I hit number 100. This number, being given time that one has to read books, looks like a reasonable limit.

Working on pro ducts

Working on a product is a totally different cup of tea. It’s demanding, requires a lot of planning and a fair amount of context switching. This is probably the most unique experience I had in a while. And I don’t mean its managerial aspects. There’s something that building a product requires from you. A kind of awareness-like thing.

Talks

This year I gave only a single talk, A gentle introduction to low-level concurrency in .NET for JetBrainsTV. I’m really happy that we made it together, not only due to the topic of amazing folks in there, but also due to values shared by this company publicly. You’re awesome.

Whether the next year will be the year of talks, we’ll see. The topics that I’m thinking about are related mostly to FinOps, edge and storage.

Open Source

The only open project that I was working on lately, Paprika, is related to storage aspects. It’s highly experimental as it tries to provide a different storage mechanism for the Merkle Tree of Ethereum. If it works, and proves that it can do better than Merkle agnostic storages, it can be a game changer. But as usual with experimental projects, it requires a lot of testing.

Meaningful conversations

Meaningful conversations with people is the thing that greatly improved the end of year. Thank you and, if you’re reading it, I hope you enjoyed them as well.

Living elsewhere

The last but not least, the decision about spending almost 2 months in total elsewhere. This was a really interesting take and unusual for our family. It worked really nicely and was a good test for potentially moving somewhere else.

Best Wishes

I wish you all the best in 2023. I hope that it will bring you a lot of opportunities to shine so that you made the best of it, either professionally or personally. Have a great year!

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