For the second year now, I've decided to do a year in review post highlighting and reflecting on my last 12 months of career and personal life. If you haven't checked out this blog post on ideas for writing an article similar to this, I highly suggest checking out Year in Review Checklist by Steve Smith. You can also check out my previous year's post here My 2021 Year In Review.

Personal Milestones

The beginning of 2022 was a busy time for my wife and me as we were remodeling our new home. We might have bitten off a little more than we could chew as new homeowners when we decided to completely renovate our entire first floor and much of the second floor with a new kitchen, flooring, paint, removing wallpaper, updated nursery, and a ton of other improvements as well. In the end, we came down to finishing the major pieces of the project just days before the biggest milestone of the year, the birth of our first child. 🐣🎉

In June, we welcomed our first child into the world and set forth on one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. Parenting is no small feat and I really have to give a shout-out to all the parents out there who are currently experiencing or have made it through the ups and downs of raising a little one, those first few months are rough but so incredibly precious. My wife and I feel incredibly blessed to have a beautiful healthy child to raise and the whole experience has really given me a renewed sense of purpose and drive for life. Watching my little one grow and learn is an absolutely humbling and inspiring process. Even with severe sleep deprivation, it's all been worth it. 😴😊

Books I Read 📕

This year's technical reading list was a little smaller than I anticipated but having a child will do that to your free time! I also spent more this year reading about soft skills and productivity as they were a bit easier in terms of cognitive load when reading on minimal sleep. Finally, I also read a few books on parenting and child development which I found to be very helpful and insightful. The Happiest Baby on the Block was a lifesaver for me as I had no previous newborn experience and I highly recommend it to any expecting parents out there.

Full reading list

• Domain Modeling Made Functional by Scott Wlaschin
• Get Programming with F#: A Guide for .NET Developers, by Isaac Abraham
• Atomic Habits, by James Clear
• Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown
• The Happiest Baby on the Block, by Harvey Karp
• Caring for Your Baby and Young Child, 7th Edition: Birth to Age 5 by American Academy of Pediatrics

Professional and Technical Accomplishments

NimblePros

As of the first of the year 2023, I've been working at NimblePros for a full year and what a great experience it has been. Steve and Michelle Smith run an amazing group of individuals and I couldn't be happier to be a part of the team. I've grown my knowledge on a ton of topics including domain-driven design, test-driven development, and event-driven architectures and I'm excited to see what the future holds for me at NimblePros. The team has a plethora of collective knowledge on modern .NET development, CI/CD, design patterns, and architecture. I enjoy getting to absorb some of that knowledge while contributing my own insights and experiences to the ecosystem. One interesting challenge this role has presented is adapting to consulting with various clients versus being an internal employee embedded in a particular product and organization. This is a new type of skill set for me in my career and was an adjustment in how I had to manage my time. It also affected how I went about communicating concerns and ideas. I've grown because of this new role in ways I didn't expect to which has been rewarding in hindsight. If you're looking for a great team to work with, I highly recommend checking out NimblePros! We're hiring!

GitHub Contributions

2022 was my biggest year ever in terms of contributions on GitHub as most of my client work has been on private GitHub repositories. Another factor is my ability to contribute to open-source projects including the NimblePros, devBetter, and Ardalis repositories. Having the flexibility and influence to identify bugs or enhancements to Steve's open-source packages and contribute to them as part of my daily work is so rewarding. I'm excited to see what 2023 brings in terms of my open-source contributions.

CSharpFunctionalExtensions.FluentAssertions

In early 2022, I paired up with Sean Wright to create my first NuGet package CSharpFunctionalExtensions.FluentAssertions. This package is a simple extension to the CSharpFunctionalExtensions library providing support for FluentAssertions for a lot of use cases that one might encounter when using the library. This was a great way to develop my understanding of CSharpFunctionalExtensions while also solidifying my experience with FluentAssertions.

FShopOnWeb and F# Contributions

In the fall of this year, Sean Wright and I onced again paired up to start a new project FShopOnWeb as an F# take on Microsoft's eShopOnWeb reference application. We've been working on it in our spare time and have made some great progress. It's been a rewarding experience learning F# as a C# developer. The path has shown me new patterns and paradigms that have helped grow my knowledge in a more functional direction while also allowing me to explore .NET from another perspective. Sean and I even contributed to the F# Advent Calender Blog describing our experiences which is something I don't think either of us would have expected to do if you had asked us a year ago. I'm excited to see where this project goes and I'm looking forward to contributing more to the F# community in 2023.

Blogs 📝

In 2022, I wrote a total of 11 blog posts which is 11 more than I wrote in 2021 📈😂. I'm hoping to continue this trend in 2023 by at least writing one per month minimum. My stretch goal would be to write 20 total by increasing more posts on more diverse topics on my personal blog while also growing my efforts on technical topics on the NimblePros blog. Blogging has become a nice way to reflect on my experiences and share my knowledge with others while also documenting issues for future reference for myself.

You can check out more of my blog posts on all things .NET, design patterns, and any programming practices I use day to day over at the NimblePros blog.

Work environment

One of the great things about buying a home was I was finally able to invest in a home office space that I knew I would be able to enjoy and benefit from for many years. After settling in to my home for a few months, I decided to upgrade my office by getting an Uplift V2 standing desk and a 49-inch ultrawide monitor. Along with a few smaller items like a Jabra 510 UC speakerphone, my productivity and comfort have increased significantly. These items have made a huge difference in my work environment and have solidified my belief that investing in your work environment is a worthwhile endeavor if you are financially able to or have financial assistance from your employer to do so. There is definitely a case to be made for some of these items in terms of employee productivity so try to reach out to your employer to see if they have any programs in place to help you out. Again, feeling very blessed to have the support of my employer to help me out with this.

Looking forward to 2023

This year was one of the best and brightest in my life and I'm incredibly happy with the milestones I've hit both professionally and personally. As I look ahead to 2023, the process of setting goals feels different from previous years now that I'm raising a child and I can appreciate having goals for both myself as a parent as well as professional accomplishments I wish to achieve. I have no plans of slowing down but I welcome the balance of this new dynamic in my life. I'm excited to see what the future holds for me and my family and I'm looking forward to sharing all of my progress with you all.