Personal: 2022 Year in a Review
Work
Still at MOIA, now on the Developer Experience team. Earlier this year we split the Platform Engineering team into Infrastructure and Developer Experience. After years of infrastructure work, I’ve enjoyed shifting toward software development while keeping one foot in infra.
The biggest lesson from this role: you have to actually talk to other dev teams to find out what’s broken. We started running structured interviews with development teams to identify pain points, and it’s been one of the best things we’ve done. DevEx is still young at MOIA, but the interview process has given us real signal about where to focus.
On the tooling side, we built a GitHub webhook receiver and dispatcher in Go, which automates a bunch of stuff for dev teams starting new projects. We also added fault tolerance and observability to shared infrastructure services, which helped a lot with trust.
Our product owner left partway through the year, so the whole team shared that responsibility for a while. It was messy but educational.
Public speaking
Got back into public speaking after the pandemic:
- Talked about code generation in Go (slides) at the Google Developer Group meetup in Hamburg. First in-person talk in a long time.
- Gave a Go workshop (slides) at DevFest 2022 in Hamburg. Had everything from experienced devs to students, which made it fun.
- Prof Dr. Stefan Sarstedt invited me back to my old Software Engineering master’s course at Uni Hamburg to talk about Architecture Decision Records and how we use them at MOIA. Good discussions about making design changes visible to contributors.
I want to keep doing conferences and meetups in person next year.
Books and learning
I finally went all-in on Vim. A coworker recommended “Practical Vim” when I joined MOIA, and I’d been slowly picking up techniques since then. This year I committed fully, and I’m not going back. Using the same shortcuts across everything feels great.
Work-related books I finished and would recommend:
- Software Engineering at Google — Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, Hyrum Wright
- The Unicorn Project — Gene Kim
- The DevOps Handbook — Gene Kim
- The Staff Engineer’s Path — Tanya Reilly
Still working through Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom.
Life
The pandemic is still here, but fewer people seem to care. I’m trying to stay careful.
The war in Ukraine has been hard to watch. It’s 2022 and this is still happening.
Valencia
Visited Valencia for the first time in May, during KubeCon. Didn’t have much time for sightseeing, but I explored the city center, ate well, and enjoyed being somewhere warm and sunny — a nice change from Hamburg weather.
The City of Arts and Sciences is worth seeing. The tram system was great and I found myself wishing Hamburg had something similar. Also realized I should have taken Spanish in school.
Tallinn and Helsinki
Finally made it to Tallinn in September after wanting to go for four years. The old town is a mix of medieval buildings and modern cafes and startups reminded me a bit of Berlin. Good food, good pubs, and the public transport was incredible: live updates in Google Maps, digital ticketing, easy to navigate. I wish we had this in Germany.
Took the ferry to Helsinki for two days. Worth the detour.
Munich
Visited my cousin in Munich and went to Oktoberfest for the first time. I’m from Germany and had somehow never been. It’s an experience, but probably not worth it if you’re not into beer. I love Munich though, it’s one of my favorite German cities.
Gaming
A few PS5 games I played this year:
Resident Evil Village — My first horror game in a long time. Great atmosphere, good story. Playing with the lights off was a mistake I’d make again.
Elden Ring — I played the Dark Souls games on PC, so I’d been waiting for this. The open world adds something new without losing the difficulty. Game of the year for me.
Horizon: Forbidden West — I never played the first one, but Forbidden West pulled me in anyway. The world is vast and gorgeous. I still haven’t finished the final quest.
God of War: Ragnarok — Improves on the first game in every way. One of the best video game storylines I’ve seen, though nothing beats Final Fantasy 8.
HeroQuest (board game) — Played this over a few months with friends. Simple, fun, and a good excuse to get together regularly.
Books
I started reading again after years of not doing it.
Tomie, Gyo, Uzumaki by Junji Ito — My first time reading Ito. Tomie is about a woman who drives everyone around her to violence. Gyo is about mechanical fish-creatures invading Japan. Uzumaki is about a town cursed by spiral patterns. All three are creative, unsettling, and genuinely disturbing. Not for everyone, but if you like horror, Ito is something else.
1984 by George Orwell — Finally read it. Hard not to draw parallels to how governments and institutions operate today. Sobering.
Conclusion
I want to paint more next year and travel outside of Europe.
Fuck war.