Yet Another New Year

It's 2022, and I feel like everyone is just tired. I haven't been code-blogging as much because it feels like most of my personal code projects (and well, just about every kind of personal project) fell to the wayside as I focused (or more accurately, hyper-fixated) on the continuous impending feeling of doom as our governments and leaders prioritize the nebulous “economy” instead of human lives (which, surprise, fuel the economy! you don't get an economy if all the humans are dead!).

But this is a code blog and this is a new year post, so let's instead talk about my various accomplishments from 2021 instead.

Last year, code-wise, I:

I guess this is a pretty okay list. I could've done more, I could've done less, but I got through 2021, and one could consider than the greatest achievement, so... I'm happy about it.

I'm happy that I have this blog, and I'm happy I did the datathon. I'm hoping to do this year's datathon as well, but we'll see how life goes!

With the new role, I'm still at the bank! I got reorged mid-2021 because of my NLP experience and Linguistics minor – it was supposed to be a role where I would focus on NLP technology within the bank. However, it ended up as a team of data scientists trying to do web dev for a chatbot, taking over an existing code base that was poorly documented at best. I have zero knowledge of JavaScript or TypeScript or anything else that was being used, but programming languages are easy to pick up – I could read the code. The problem for me was that I had no web dev knowledge. I was floundering – like what the hell is a POST request? What's an end point? These are pretty basic concepts but my previous experience never needed me to know about these things.

Of course, I vaguely know about them now, but honestly, it's not my jam. This is why we have specialties! It's like how I knew I didn't want to do civil engineering (buildings? foundations? boring) in school, but I was so fascinated with my choice of engineering physics (rocket science? nuclear physics? fluid dynamics? give me more of that good stuff). And of course, now I'm in a software engineering field, so y'know. You end up doing things you didn't think about before, but it's still something I found interesting and something I worked to be good at.

Anyway, I quickly learned that it wasn't the right reorg for me, and luckily someone internally was looking for someone like me around the time I was looking to find a better place, so it all worked out. I'm quite happy about it! I did do a few external interviews through the year to see how things looked outside the bank, but I'm actually quite happy to stay here. It's not perfect, but what company is?

Django was interesting to look at because it did touch on the various web-dev-y things I was tasked with learning at work. I was actually hoping to use it to hook into the spaced repetition system that I was playing around with, but I'll be honest. Web things are just a pain in the ass to me. I don't understand it, and I don't want to put the work into understanding it because there are way more interesting (to me) things to work on!

But the SRS thing I was working on was pretty fun! I'm hoping to expand it with a “proper” (or at least functional) GUI at some point this year! I also don't understand how GUIs work (and making things look “pretty” is the worst thing you could ask me to do – I'm so bad at it), but it's cool to see how things come together.

I'm hoping to continue doing talks at work in 2022. Doing the linguistics talk 3 times last year was a lot, but I guess I'm really good at it now. People have also asked for more in-depth linguistics/NLP topics, so I'd love to find time to create those as well. Work-specific talks, I suppose, will depend on the work I'm doing, but I'm optimistic that I'll have some useful stuff eventually, though maybe not this year!

Anyway, it's a new year, and although it's already kinda crappy, hopefully we can go up from here.

#meta