Year in review — 2022

Bharat Kalluri / 2022-12-26

A year is a long time, a lot of things happen in an years timeframe. This is a look back on what happened in 2022, highlights & reflections.

Career

The second year in the journey of the startup (Refyne). Its been a wild ride watching the company grow from 8 people when it started, to today.

The theme for the last year for the company has been speed & quality. This year was around stability, performance & scale. The team has near about tripled and dynamics change as the company grows. Last year was entirely about greenfield projects, this entire year has been around brownfield projects. Took a couple of very large multi month projects from start to end. Refactoring and scaling systems has been the P0 this year. Learnt a lot in terms how teams work, how to work with other teams, plan projects and deliver and how to debug, profile and scale backends.

It's been a fun year in terms of career. Lot of things to look forward to in the next year!

Treks

This year did not have a lot of treks. And nothing towards the extreme. But all in all a good year in terms of trekking.

Kuderemukh: The hardest of all. Probably the hardest I've ever attempted in Karnataka. Apparently Kumara parvata is the hardest around here (Bangalore). That's for the 2023.

Gokarna: This is a trail touching all the 5 beaches of Gokarna. Paradise, Half moon, Om, Kudle and main beach. Classifying this as a trek is not really accurate, even though thats what it's called. This was a light trek, had a lot of fun relaxing in the shacks around the beach.

Skandagiri: I would rate this a medium in terms of effort, partly just because it's a very dry & rocky terrain. Gets particularly hard when getting down since there is a lot of scope to slip. The sunrise from the peak is absolutely breathtaking.

Casual travel

A lot of travel this year has been casual and fun, with friends.

Also, this is the first time I tried solo travelling. Travelled to Kodaikanal over the weekend and stayed in a zostel. Met a lot of interesting people, It was a great experience! highly recommended.

Wayanad
Coorg
Kodaikanal
Allepy
Bhadrachalam
Hyderabad

Running

Something new I picked up this year.

This has been on my todo list for a while, but this year I got inspired by a friend who is into endurance running and started running seriously.

On April 10th, I committed to the target of completing a half marathon. A half marathon is 21KM run, its no small feat. Especially for someone who has never done any good running in their lifetime. Although I could not finish a half marathon, a lot of progress was made!

Here are some milestones

April 12th: Started running for the first time, ran a 2k with a horrible pace. Was very hard to even complete the 2k. Realised the dream is very very far away 🤣
May 5th: First 5k
May 27th: First 7.5k
June 6th: First 10k 🥳. This was a massive milestone for me. Now the idea of a running 20k seems a bit more achievable. I kept doing 5Ks & 7Ks in June.

After this, a couple of things happened in my personal life and I had to travel a lot. And during all this, I unfortunately got injured on the left leg and had to take a longer break from running. Got back to running on December.

December 5th: 5k again, started running frequently again ever since

Ran for a total of 125 KM this year. This could have been a much higher number if not for the break. So, the target of doing a half marathon is pushed to 2023 now.

Reading

Has not been a great year for reading. Just read 4 books.

Measure what matters: About OKRs. A framework to plan, crystallise and define progress. A fantastic read.
How to sit: On peace, meditation and how to live.
Breathe: This one I've started reading after I heard James Nestor on the Joe Rogan podcast. Really changed my mind on the importance of breathing though nose. Also got me into meditating. Highly recommend if this subject fascinates you.

Movies, series, music & podcasts

Has been a good year for movies! Some of my favourites were

Everything everywhere all at once
Glass onion
Batman
RRR
Wakanda forever

I've also watched a lot of classics like Zodiac, Django unchained and many others.

On series too, its been a great year.

Mindhunter: The second season has been absolutely unforgettable and mind blowing!
Pantheon: Adult animation. Explores ideas like identity, Artificial intelligence, Uploaded intelligence and the definitions of being human. Adult animation is a field which does not get enough love, I think a lot of people will love these if they open their minds for something new.
Sandman: An adaption of the sandman comics by Neil gaiman. Was very well made, partly because the author himself was involved in the making. I'll start reading the originals now.

On the podcasts front, I've just been endlessly consuming

Writing

Nothing here, I've started a wiki where some interesting pieces were written. Also started writing notes. Starting to slowly get back in the rhythm. Will try and make the next year better in this dimension.

Open source & contributions

Nothing here too, need to work on this in 2023.

Misc

Some other pieces which don't deserve a new section (yet)

Got into the Fountain pens rabbit hole, got myself a Lamy. Started taking notes by hand too.
Started learning guitar towards the end of December, hopefully will get decent over 2023.

Thats all folks! It was a good year all in all, lets see whats in store for 2023.