Week of December 31, 2021

It's been a long year. Here's what I did this year and what I want to do in 2022.

Engineering and Career

I've worked in Security for two years now. I started off with no clue about security engineering, but I've been slowly learning as I go. I'm still very much a Software Engineer with experience in security engineering vs a "real" security engineer, but I've picked up some knowledge. I've gained a lot of concrete knowledge about web security and cryptography this year. However, the thing that I've found really valuable to learn is the thought process and engineering practices that get used to protect large codebases being worked on by thousands of engineers. I'll write about things I've learned in future posts in this newsletter, but for now, I'll recommend a few good things that I read this year:

OWASP has been the resource for me to learn about common security things. The top 10 is a great place to start if you want to evaluate the security of your codebase.
I read parts of Ross Anderson's Security Engineering book as part of a book club, and found it both interesting and illuminating.

Outside of work, I did not really build too many things this year. In the beginning of the year, I helped build music discovery features for ListenBrainz, but sadly, I wasn't able to keep the momentum for the remainder of the year. After that, I have basically zero open-source contributions.

I spent a lot of time helping a friend prepare for interviews as she changed jobs. This involved us solving LeetCode problems together over weekends. We went over many topics, from simple ones like linked lists to more complicated ones like dynamic programming and trees. In total, we must have solved at least a hundred problems. The work was worth it in the end, as my friend got a few pretty cushy offers. I've always found teaching to be fun when I know the things at hand, and it was a nice experience overall, with the added benefit of keeping me in touch with the basics.

Another very interesting thing that I did this year related to careers was help a number of my friends negotiate job offers. I had read patio11's salary negotiation essay some time last year, and it was quite illuminating to apply the advice in the real world. It made me realize how much of a jobseeker's market it is, and how much value just a single well-written email can generate. If you're an engineer switching jobs, I cannot recommend the essay strongly enough.

My practice of writing notes has also continued to go well. I have a total of 170 notes on my notes site now. It is a bit embarrassing, but the most useful notes on that site for me personally have been the kindle highlights of books I've read, things that I haven't written. I've found going back to just the highlights of books really helpful to remind myself the core things in a book.

Music and Books

I read 15 books in 2021, of which 8(!) were non-fiction. My favorites were:

I also listened to a lot of music this year. Spotify says I listened to 60,532 minutes of music this year, more than 99.5% of listeners in India. It is a little sad however that most of this is old music that I knew already, not new music. I spent only some time trying to find new music this year, however, I do have two albums from 2021 that I really like and can recommend:

Health

I gained a lot of weight in 2020, and realized I needed to do something about it this year. I picked up running in the beginning of the year when lockdowns were strict and gyms were closed. I've made a lot of progress through the year.

Over the year, I've run 442.4 km outside, not counting workouts on the treadmill or in the gym. I ran a half-marathon (21.1 km) in 2hr40min in June. The time isn't very impressive, but just being able to run the distance was huge for me. After that, I focussed on strength training and did Stronglifts 5x5 for 2 months, before doing squats every workout became too much for me.

I started focussing back on running in November, with the goal of a 25 min 5k, my current best is 29:30. I find running more fun that strength training, so I'm planning on focussing more on running while doing some strength training in the future.

The number of workouts (runs/strength training/other cardio all included) per month is as follows:

December - 14 November - 10 October - 12 September - 5 August - 5 July - 8 June - 17 May - 19 April - 15 March - 18 February (start) - 8

August and September were not good months, I lost a bit of motivation and I think I didn't track a few workouts too. My goal going forward is 4 runs a week, which should mean at least 16 workouts a month for 2021.

In terms of weight, I went from 77 kg (nearing obesity) in the beginning of the year to 65 kg in May. After that, I got back to 69 kg as I wanted to gain some muscle with strength training. Since September, I've been stable at 69kg, which seems a nice number to me.

Chess

I spent a lot of time playing chess on Lichess this year. I played a total of 2,856 games which is a bit crazy, even if 1,866 of them were 1 minute bullet games. I don't have much to show for the thousands of bullet games, but I have slowly improved in longer time controls. My rapid (games with ~10-15 minutes per side) rating peaked at 1803 in November, before settling down to 1760 for the end of the year. My blitz (games with ~3-5 minutes per side) rating showed the most improvement, I've gone from 1462 at the beginning of the year to 1682 right now, peaking at 1694 (painfully close to 1700).

Most of this improvement is from passively watching chess content on youtube. Channels I can recommend are Eric Rosen and GothamChess. I also did a lot of puzzles on lichess in free time, my puzzle rating right now is 2309, I started the year at 1797. I also have been reading Jeremy Silman's How To Reassess Your Chess on and off over the past 3-4 months.

Goals

I have the following goals for 2022.

50 min 10k
1900 lichess blitz, 2000 rapid
Keep writing this newsletter
Read 15 books (at least 5 non-fiction)

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