Tag: review

Charitable Giving in 2023

Posted on by Scott

The number of hours left in 2023 is down to single digits as I write this. This year as in past years, the majority of my charitable giving is to churches within my denomination (Seventh-Day Adventist), with additional giving to non-profit journalism and other non-religious causes.

Religiously-Motivated Charitable Giving

Unlike previous years, where I only donated to my home church, I also donated to every church that I attended either in-person or online at least once this calendar year. This included Boston Temple, which I attended in-person when I visited my cousin there in October, as well as Oakwood University Church (online), Revision Church Atlanta SDA (online), along with the churches in my local area I visit most often in-person.

As I did last year, I donated to Adventist Community Services of Greater Washington (ACSGW). I also donated to my high school alma mater again this year.

Other Charitable Giving

Other destinations for my charitable giving this year included the following organizations (in no particular order):

Charitable Giving Plans for 2024

Having finally added back to the roster of charitable donation recipients I missed in past years, one change I anticipate making in 2024 is donating to whatever the organization resulting from the merger between CIR/Reveal and Mother Jones is ultimately called.

Non-profit journalists did great work this year in exposing the depths of Clarence Thomas’ corruption, methods used by the Mormon church to keep child sex abuse cases secret, a healthcare company trying to deny coverage to a chronically ill patient, and more. Especially in a presidential election year, where for-profit newsrooms like The New York Times appear to be using their coverage to weigh in in favor of the powerful, non-profit newsrooms will be more important than ever. If you haven’t already donated to a non-profit newsroom this year, I encourage you to get that donation in before the new year.

In 2024, consider supporting a non-profit newsroom in your local area. The Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) has a tool that will match you with such organizations so you can donate to them directly and follow their coverage. I might be adding some Maryland non-profit newsrooms to my charitable giving plans before this time next year.

Looking Back at Highs and Lows of 2023

Posted on by Scott

Highlights:

  • Expanded scope at work
    • 2 stand-alone teams versus one large one
    • New area of responsibility
    • Managing (and delegating to) team lead and tech leads for the first time
    • Having skip-level 1-on-1s
    • Got to hire some contractors (to work around the headcount freeze of last year)
  • 12th wedding anniversary
  • Twins turned 8 years old
  • Published more blog posts than in 2022 (31 including this one versus 22 last year)
  • Ramped up my pleasure reading, including:
    • The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives, by Adolph L. Reed
    • Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson
    • Heavy, by Kiese Laymon
    • Spook Street, by Mick Herron (#4 in the Slough House series)
    • The List, by Mick Herron
    • Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi
    • Tiamat’s Wrath, by James S.A. Corey (#8 of 9 in The Expanse series)
    • London Rules, by Mick Herron (#5 in the Slough House series)
    • The Ghost Brigades, by John Scalzi
    • The Last Colony, by John Scalzi
    • Beacon 23, by Hugh Howey
  • Successful cataract surgery
  • Solo vacation this year was to Boston, to visit my cousin and do some touristy stuff

Lowlights:

  • Didn’t complete AWS Serverless badge (a work goal for the year that I ran out of time for)
  • Had to deliver below strong ratings for an employee for the first time
  • Did not work on my health enough

2022 Year in Review

Posted on by Scott

Some highlights from this year:

  • Very strong year-end review (best ever at my current employer)
    • Substantial pay raise
    • RSUs added to my compensation package for the first time in my career
  • Promoted to senior manager at mid-year
  • Returned to the office
    • Hybrid model of Tuesday-Thursday in-office with Mondays and Fridays still remote
  • 11th wedding anniversary
  • Twins turned 7 years old
  • I lost about 10 pounds
  • Wrote 22 blog posts (including this one)
    • Moved this site to Amazon Lightsail (more on that in a future post)
  • Finally updated my library card so I can borrow books with Libby and in-person
  • Completed some reading for pleasure, including:
    • Defining Moments in Black History: Reading Between the Lies (by Dick Gregory)
      • Borrowed physically from the library
    • The first three books of Mick Herron’s Slough House books
      • Slow Horses
      • Dead Lions
      • Real Tigers (borrowed via Libby)
    • They Called Us Enemy: Expanded Edition (by George Takei)
    • Black Cop’s Kid: An Essay (by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar)
  • Completed Building Microservices (by Sam Newman) in technical book club at work
  • Took an actual solo vacation (Philadelphia)

Some lowlights from this year:

  • Ending contractor terms early for performance reasons
  • Navigating a headcount freeze (which will persist into 2023)
  • Not enough exercise

Another Year Gone

Posted on by Scott

It’s annual review time again, which means this year has gone by even more quickly than usual. Filling out my self-assessment was a good reminder of all the work I had a hand in completing.  I’m still deciding on goals for 2012, and I’m posting all of them here so I can look back on them over the course of next year and track my progress.

  1. Learn jQuery.  I got a bit of exposure to it this year through a couple of projects that I worked on, and a .NET user group presentation or two, but haven’t done the sort of deep dive that would help me improve the look-and-feel of the web applications I build and maintain.
  2. Learn a functional programming language.  I’ve been thinking about this more recently since some of our work involves the implementation of valuation models in code.  I also came across this article in the November Communications of the ACM advocating OCaml.  Since I work in a Microsoft shop, picking up something like F# might have a slightly better chance of making it into production code than OCaml or Haskell.  Part of my objective in learning a functional programming language is to help me recognize and make better use of functional techniques in a language like C#, which has added more and more support for the functional programming style of the years.
  3. Give a few technical talks/presentations.  This year, I presented on NuGet at my job, and on Reflector at RockNUG. Having to present on a tool or technology to group has always been a great incentive to do some deep learning of a subject.  It’s also a chance to exercise some speaking skills (which developers need a lot more than they might think in order to be successful) and to handle a Q & A session.  I haven’t developed any new presentations yet, but some prospective topics include: LINQPad, elmah,
  4. Take more online training. We have access to Pluralsight .NET training through work.  I watched quite a few of their videos over the course of the year.  2012 shouldn’t be any different in that respect.  I recently came across free webcasts on a variety of topics from DevelopMentor.  Since they’re downloadable as well as streamable, I’ll definitely use my commute to watch some of them.
  5. Write a compiler. It’s been awhile since I’ve cracked open “the dragon book”, so I’m probably overdue to exercise my brain in that way.  I found that suggestion (and a number of other very useful ones) here.
  6. Practice.  I’d heard of the “code kata” idea before, but hadn’t really explored it.  Dave Thomas of Pragmatic Programmers has nearly a couple dozen here.