Some really great things happened in 2022 - I started a new job, learned a lot, and had a really off the charts wonderful baby - but on balance it sort of sucked.

The year started weirdly. After the best part of 17 years at IBM, and in the midst of really loving my job there working on open-sourcey things, I decided I needed a change. There were a bunch of factors. Pandemic burnout, feeling a bit under challenged, money (did I mention the second baby on the way?).. mostly after a long time in one very big organisation it felt like now or never to try something new. Like leaving a great relationship because it’s time, it hurt and it still hurts even though you know it was the right decision. I miss that job!

In any event, 2022 started - therefore - with an ending. A wrapping up of loose ends in knative and IBM, and then a too-short-in-retrospect break before starting a new challenge at Deliveroo.

Why Deliveroo? Well, why not. There were many factors. First just timing. I’d had the thought that it might be time to try other things, and - weirldy - watched a podcast interview with the CEO on the morning that a recruiter messaged asking if I was interested. Secondly: a huge change, a big challenge. It wasn’t cloud, or open source, or platform tech, or even really a tech company. It was a company on a fast growth trajectory that was shipping actual software to actual users. That felt fun (and it has been!).

The interview process was pretty great, and I remember really liking all the interviewers (which makes sense, having worked with them for a year now, they are in fact all excellent). And I remember the moment I knew I was going to say yes. It was when my now-VP described the job I ended up taking, going deep on the dispatch algorithms team. It was new, it was exciting, I’d get to learn a bunch of new stuff and there was the opportunity to make a big impact. So, it was a yes.

So this was a year of learning new things, of joining a new team, figuring out the ropes at a new company and finding ways to make an impact in a completely new domain. I’m proud to say I do think I did that pretty well. From a standing start I’ve become pretty ok at logistics and delivery algorithms and found some pretty fun stuff to drive and make happen, as well as being an I-hope-not-too-annoyingly persistent voice in improving engineering practices in the company as a whole.

It was also, as mentioned - and this I cannot describe as having gone anything but wonderfully - the year our second daughter was born. Mila Jane Natalia Friedman. This will always be the year Mila arrived, and a great year for that.

So, as 2022 ends and 2023 begins, what has gone truly well, and what has sucked?

The Great List

  • I really have had a great year at Deliveroo. There have been enormous frustrations and challenges but my main goal this year work-wise was to get out of my comfort zone, come up to speed in a new domain, and be a user of cloud tech to ship software rather than a producer of tools I wasn’t really and truly using. By any reasonable measure on these scores this year was a success.
  • The baby, did I mention the baby?
  • The two year old! Not to be out-done this was the year my two year old started to develop language, and, with it, a little personality. The word love does no justice to how I feel about my children (and partner (and iphone haha)).

The Gripe List

  • One Step Forward Two Steps Back: I’m feeling the loss of the things I loved about the old job. Being involved in open source and feeling like the things I contributed had the chance, if they worked, to make significant numbers of developer’s lives easier. It was something that was easy to get passionate about, and also that I think I was pretty good at. I’m not there yet with food delivery and logistics, though I am finding it a ton of fun.
  • The world changed. Early 2022 was a time of optimism and ambition. Companies falling over themselves to hire software engineers. Low interest rates. A new job, and new challenges. A new baby on the horizon. Then: Ukraine, rumblings of recession, inflation. Everything got a little bit harder, a little bit more risky. A year that started out feeling optimistic, ended feeling a lot more pessimistic.
  • I did not achieve my fitness and health goals. I wanted to hit the big 4-0 (which will happen all too soon this year) feeling healthy and fit. In the end I’ll be hitting it feeling a bit overweight, tired and quite out of shape.

Mostly I’ve ended the year feeling a little unmoored. I’ve lost track of feeling like I know where I want to be in five years or what success looks like. Possibly the answer is I should just enjoy what is a very nice life, because in the end life is short (and good!) and should be enjoyed for what it is, but having a clear set of goals is what gets me out of bed and excites me, and I miss feeling excited.

So here I am, looking at 2023 and trying to figure out what success looks like and what I want to be doing with the second half (if Im very lucky) of my life.

Answers on a postcard to hello at julian friedman dot org, thank you!