Looking back at 2021

Hard to really look at those last years feeling super positive to be honest, given life has basically been put on halt. But at least I feel fortunate this year was void of bad news from me.

Timeline

🦍 January 4th. I started a new role at Gorillas as an Engineering Lead, after 4+ years at N26.

📦 February 17th. I released version 6 of a11y-dialog without many user-facing changes. It was mainly moving the bundling stage to rollup to be a bit more flexible.

📦 March 23rd. I released version 7 of a11y-dialog, which was an interesting milestone which significantly reduced complexity. a11y-dialog has subsequently been recommended by Scott O’hara in his long-standing rebutal of the native <dialog> element.

🏳️‍⚧️ May 23rd. I came out as being non-binary trans to my parents, something I was dreading for a long time.

🏳️‍🌈 June 30th. I spoke at an internal Gorillas event about what it is like to be non-binary in the workplace, and what people and organizations can do to support people like me.

👂 July 3rd. I got my ears pierced! I was a little nervous originally, but I’m super happy with it in the end. I get to wear cute earrings all the time!

📝 July 28th. I finally got to write for Smashing Magazine for the very first time. I authored a nice technical piece on building a dialog library from scratch. I’ve been reading Smashing Magazine for years, and am honored having finally been able to contribute to that incredible publication.

🪒 July 30th. I started facial hair removal therapy. As of writing, I have gone through 4 sessions already, and am looking for another 3 or 4 more to be completely finished. Having facial hair, even a little, has been a big source of dysphoria for me, so I’m super excited getting rid off it for good.

👩‍💻 August. I took on a position of Group Engineering Lead, which is significantly less hands on than I’ve been used to — something I’m not necessarily unhappy with. This gave me the opportunity to have a bigger impact on the Product & Engineering organization as a whole, which is something I’m proud of.

👀 September 13th. I got asked to be a reviewer for the Smart Interface Design Patters course by Vitaly Friedman, the founder of Smashing Magazine. It was a lot of fun to be able to go through the whole content and give suggestions and feedback!

💬 September 25th. I started getting some counceling in order to be able to discuss a variety of topics (difficult or not) with someone impartial and outside of them. It’s been helpful overall.

🔨 November 8th. I submitted my first pull-request to Next.js aiming at improving the vocal announcement of page changes. While this was pretty minor, it feels nice having been able to contribute to such a big open-source project.

🌱 November 15th. This day marked 3 years for me without eating meat and two years without fish.

🎂 December. I turned 30. On this occasion, I wrote a 30-tweets long thread of advice on frontend development, in case you are into that sort of thing.

🧩 December 17th. I unfortunately gave up on Advent of Code after a 16-days streak, being unable to solve the puzzle of the day. This killed my motivation to even attempt any day after that, so I’m leaving it at that.

👗 December 26th. I wore a dress and heels outside for the first time, a personal accomplishment I’m glad to be ending the year on!

For next year

Same as every year, I don’t set goals because I never follow through. The only thing I need to do is a full health checkup to make sure I’m all good. But that really is about it.