I’m having trouble writing a recap this year. A lot of small things happened, and I worked a lot, but overall the year has felt very nebulous — long and short at once.
Work-wise, my focus this past year has been all-in on the WordPress.org redesign. The News redesign was mostly finished in 2021 but launched in 2022, and that was kind of a proof of concept – could the design be implemented in a block-based way? Our team learned from that, and then came the wordpress.org homepage & download section. Other sites are in progress — Showcase just launched, Documentation will launch soon, and there’s a new developer blog in beta.
In-person events started up again, so I was able to attend some conferences this past year. In April, I went to StaffPlus in NYC, a tech conference for senior devs who aren’t people-managers. It was a great conference, and probably nice that it was just one day since it was my first covid-era event. Later, in the summer, I also attended & spoke at WordCamp Montclair. It was really great to give a talk again, though I felt pretty rusty. I had to miss WordCamp US, since a college friend’s wedding was the same weekend — we had a nice trip up to western MA though.
I gardened again this year, after fixing up the raised bed (last year I mentioned lining it with burlap, I dug out all the dirt and stapled in a real lining this time). I also bought a greenhouse frame and some mesh fabric to use as a screen so that birds and small animals wouldn’t get in and eat all the baby plants. It worked out well, but I didn’t realize how tall my tomatoes and tomatillos would get by mid-July they were both taller than the structure, so I had to pull the fabric off… so then all the bok choy got eaten
Lesson learned this year? Keep tomatoes & tomatillos in pots, and stick to leafy things & herbs in the bed. Also, prune both way more.
We celebrated a year with Lemon, and in November we got a second dog, Noodle. Noodle came from Korean K9 Rescue; he was evacuated from a shelter in Uljin before a wildfire destroyed it, and eventually brought to the US. Like Lemon, he’s a Korean mix, though he looks less jindo-y. He’s also very lanky, he’s only half Lemon’s weight but they’re shoulder-to-shoulder the same height. He’s just under a year old, and still has his puppy excitement, and it’s been bringing Lemon out of her shell a bit more.
And these are a few of my favorite Lemon photos from the year.
Like I said I would last year, I stopped using Duolingo for Korean when I hit the 365 streak. Unfortunately, while LingoDeer is much better for learning, it did not have the same gamification & easy drop-in that Duolingo does, and I fell completely out of learning during the summer. I picked Duolingo up again in the fall, figuring that something is better than nothing. I’m going to try to do better with supplemental learning via TalkToMeInKorean, and actually journaling.
I also want to try using this site as a semi-personal blog again, maybe more in a microblog style, but I ran into an issue when trying to update my site design… so more thought will need to go here. (also, I’m on mastodon now, @ryelle@front-end.social)
I’m going to repeat what I ended with last year, since covid is still here and is still a concern. Events are coming back, but if they’re not done safely, it’s just going to exclude more people.
I don’t really have much to say about [next year] without going into covid, and I wanted to keep this post light. All I can say is that I hope if you’re reading this, you’re doing your part to keep your community safe.