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Monthly updates + happenings
2022 Updates
- Continued UI / accessibility engineering work for a publicly traded HR software company, and some work on cookie policy updates for another global SaaS provider.
- Attended a small workshop on Web Components, and did some deep diving into algorithms and data structures (linked lists, bubble sorts, etc.) for some continuing professional development.
- Kitted out my .vimrc with some new plugins for writing. If you're interested in using vim for writing prose, check out vim-pencil and goyo.vim
- Continued my journey into learning the guitar with some lessons on the Circle of Fourths and 6-2-5-1 chord progressions. Still looking for a decent used electric guitar.
- Hosted our family for Boxing Day Christmas Brunch and went to a bunch of holiday parties. Big change from the last two years of Covid Christmases. Enjoyable but also exhausting for this introvert.
- These are the songs that carried me through December.
- All my 2022 playlist songs combined into one year-end playlist.
That's a wrap on 2022 for me. Wishing you all the very best in 2023!
- Continued UI / accessibility engineering work for a publicly traded provider of human resources software.
- On the privacy side, I spent some time consulting on the fallout of the CNIL decision re Google Analytics.
- Visited my parents for the first time in almost a year, and watched my dad's band play a car show in the middle of nowhere - he's 74 and still slapping the bass 😄.
- Set up a new raspberrypi at home, running openvscode-server to give me a personal "Codespace", secured with Tailscale.
- Finished watching Station Eleven - a difficult but also beautiful show; Himesh Patel should win an emmy - he gives a tour de force performance imho.
- Started re-watching Halt and Catch Fire - a show about failure and feeling good lost - themes I'm working more with myself lately.
- Got a new tattoo by Jack Candlish, a Toronto artist currently at Archive whose work I admire.
- These are the songs that carried me through June.
- Continued UI / accessibility engineering work for a publicly traded provider of human resources software.
- Continued embedded privacy engineering support for a large SaaS client.
- Read through every decision on GDPRHub re Article 5(1)(e) of the GDPR on data retention. Noteworthy finding: technical debt doesn't justify keeping personal data after it has served its use.
- Updated my personal site to use Markdoc (Stripe's open source markdown authoring system) to render mainly flat HTML / CSS, and removed Next.JS / React. Wrote a few words about that and the perf results here.
- Made some tiny contributions to the Markdoc library itself.
- Barbecued for the first time this year. Jerk chicken wings!
- These are the songs that carried me through May.
- Continued accessibility engineering for a publicly traded provider of human resources software. Really productive month. Helped them interview a few UI engineering candidates.
- Continued embedded privacy engineering work for a high growth SaaS client. Spent time considering how data can be schemaed to facilitate GDPR Article 28(3)(e) requests.
- Saw my sister, brother-in-law, neice and nephew for the first time in months over Easter. Ate delicious Armenian food to the point of uncomfortable fullness.
- Got my first haircut in 5 months.
- Went running for first time in nearly a year.
- Watched a couple good new shows: Tokyo Vice and Slow Horses.
- Booked appointment for a new tattoo!
- These are the songs that carried me through April.
- Continued accessibility work for a publicly traded provider of human resources software.
- Continued embedded privacy engineering work for a high growth SaaS client.
- Celebrated my partner's birthday 🥳.
- Met up with some old friends, slowly dipping toes into the world of post-Covid restrictions.
- These are the songs that carried me through March.
- Started work for a new client, a publicly traded provider of human resources software. I'm working to help make their aging Dojo / React codebase accessible to WCAG Level AA spec. It's not sexy work, but I like the idea that I'm enabling human rights.
- Continued embedded work with another client who lost their lead privacy engineer. Currently assisting with the privacy design for a data warehouse in Amazon Redshift.
- Started studying for the CIPT certification. I don't love certification schemes, but it seems a good way to refine and document my knowledge in this space.
- Started going to the gym again, and doing strength training to improve my back. It has been really helpful with my day-to-day.
- These are the songs that carried me through February.
- Continued microservice modernization work for a leading Fintech. This was the last month of our contract, wrapping nearly two years of back-end / cloud work for a large Microsoft customer.
- Attended a few meetings to discuss next projects. Looking forward to some potential new UI opportunities.
- Helped an old client who lost their lead privacy engineer design processes for handling data subject requests and architect a process for syncing third party data deletion requests with their sales and marketing databases.
- Gyms were closed, and I'm still healing my back for running, but I did a fair bit of shoveling and walking in -22°C weather because Canada.
- These are the songs that carried me through January. A lot of shoegaze, perhaps echoing the blurring of days for me right now.
- Watched The Smile livestream concert. It's not live music, but I'll take what I can get.