~/diary/2021 Recap
Updated Jan 7, 2022

🖊 2021 Recap Friday, Dec 31, 2021

A worthy goal for a year is to learn enough about a subject so that you can’t believe how ignorant you were a year earlier – Kevin Kelly

As my sabbatical year comes to an end, I find myself asking: did i waste this year chasing butterflies, and being lazy? Or I did exactly what I was supposed to do, explore, experience, expand?

Most days, I’m pretty confident it’s the latter. The year was incredibly enriching. In an attempt to finally and definitively prove to my self I wasn’t just wasting time, I started compiling a list of all the awesome things I could remember.

If I kept my 9-5 job, my bank account would be happier, but I would not have most of the things on this list (to be fair, this year was possible only thank to my 9-5 jobs I held for the previous 10 years).

N.B. A link or mention is not a endorsement of a project. It just means it was a positive experience for me.

Quests, Adventures & Experiences

• Talking to dozens of activists and hacktivists all over the world
• 3 talks
• 2 social game/tools adopted by online communities
• 1 Hackaton prize
• A grant application
• Passing the Google interview
• Getting to know my extended family
• Consultations and freelance work
• Moving to a new place
• Rediscovering the joy of hacking and coding for fun
• Sailing in the Bay
• 6 weeks in Italy (with incursions in France, Switzerland, Croatia)
• A month in Brooklyn
• Lunch with DS, JM, & Prof. ML
• Hugspocalypse
• SEEDS
• MetaGame
• RaidGuild
• Parents Helping Parents
• iMentor
• Equalit.ie
• Synadia
• Kernel
• Ethereum, web3, NFTs
• Moontribe

Skills (acquired and/or leveled up)

Personal

• Communication and writing
• Car buying/selling
• Home maintenance
• Open Source Software funding
• Spells
• Hourly work, time-management, planning
• Tame the nicotine monster
• Journaling, mind-mapping
• Entrepreneurship
• Personal finance

Technical

• Golang
• Python (async, threads, data processing and visualization)
• Discord bot APIs
• Web hosting, static website generators, email hosting, DNS configuration
• Self-hosted services, groupware
• Javascript
• Service design
• Vultr, Fly.io, AWS

Tools

• Timers
• NATS
• nix
• tmux
• borg
• Matrix
• Mastodon
• Holochain
• git-annex
• Docker

Artifacts

• Skill Tree
• skill-bot
• New homepage
• Public notes and bookmarks
• Organic Social
• Spiral
• The first dollar earned as free agent
• Obsidian Rolodex

Sources of wisdom and inspiration

• LessWrong
• HackerNews
• Wonderville
• Le Papillon
• NixNet
• Darknet Diaries
• Superhighway84
• Hammertime
• The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible
• https://kk.org/thetechnium/68-bits-of-unsolicited-advice/
• The Night Circus
• Interface (Neal Stephenson)
• Farnam Street’s Mental Models
• Crash Course Philosophy
• Explorabl.es
• Nicky Case
• Regenerative Design
• Nonviolent Communication
• Permaculture
• Second Brain tools & Techniques
• Effective Altruism
• Hackers of Planet Earth

New and old friends

BC, PS, JH, DS ~ Pe, Mi, Pe, Gn ~ MG ~ MG, TK ~ MH & KM, Dr. RC ~ JJ, AS ~ AP ~ NH ~ PM ~ DC ~ MK, GB, SC ~ KY & WL ~ M ~ JG & GB ~ C&M ~ AS & CT