Writing a year-in-review post just hits different this time around, huh? 2020 was a dumpster-fire year in many ways, but not in every way.
This year I spent more time with my family than I have since high school. I explored new neighborhoods in San Francisco on foot, falling in love with new corners of the city along the way. And I was fortunate – in every sense of the word – to be employed, working safely from home, with interesting problems to solve.
This was also a successful year, professionally. We built a lot of fun software at GitHub, I wrote more on this blog than I expected, I iterated regularly on this personal site (Bookmarks, AMA, HN, Stack), and recorded Design Details weekly. In December we retired Spec.fm, and I began working on a new interview side project, Staff Design.
I learned a lot this year: socially, politically, economically, professionally, and personally. In this way, 2020 hasn't been all bad.
Thematically, 2020 was Being Online. My screen time shot up dramatically, I lost myself on Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube. In the summer, I dropped all side projects and played more video games than I have in many years. I watched more TV and movies than I have before, read less than in years past, and doom-scrolled political news in an unhealthy way throughout October and November.
So I want to change these behaviors this year. Not specifically, but generally. The best way I can frame this is in terms of a ratio:
2021 is the year of creating, focused on improving my ratio of creation to consumption.
Moving a ratio, rather than moving some concrete number (like reading x books, or writing y posts), feels correct.
I rebuilt my personal website last December, and somehow managed to keep iterating and writing regularly through 2020. For people working on their own personal sites, I thought it could be useful to share a few things I've learned:
Happy New Year, everyone!
🥳
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