2023 is almost done, how is it going? Mine seems flat because looks like more than 60% of my time is sitting at home, coding and working. But if I think a little bit, perhaps some remarkable journeys are worth to be mentioned.

Covid

Worst new year ever because my wife and I got COVID-19 at the same time. My wife got it first probably from an event that she attended and suddenly got sick and high fever after a few days. She couldn't smell anything so we went to a clinic and positive identified for Covid.

The next day I got a high fever and my body was in pain. I also started to lose the capability of smelling which I thought must be Covid infection from my wife. The booster vaccine I took several months ago just didn't work, maybe it was a new variant or the infection was too massive. The best part is it was during my on-call rotation schedule. Couldn't think or even work properly.

Almost spent 2 weeks self-isolating at home. Full of boredom.

New Blog & Personal Site

I started my new blog at the end of 2022 using Showwcase platform migrating from my Medium platform, but in 2023 I decided to move my blog to Hashnode. The reason was that Hashnode offered a better experience for technical blogging, good communities, and is quite reliable.

I did think of blogging with some kind of self-build platform like Jekyll, Gatsby, Github Pages, or even Notion. Then after several attempts, I decided just to use Hashnode. Just didn't want to be overcomplexed thing which could end up as an abandoned project because my main focus is just writing.

My old landing page was from Showwcase which is good. It supports custom domain and portfolio / CV-based generated web page. You can see it at didikts.showwcase.com

Unfortunately, it was very buggy, and unstable, and often got silly errors. So I decided to build my own version. I chose Astro and tweaked one of the themes to be suited to my preference. Struggled a little bit with CSS thing but I did it anyway. With the power of Vercel & Cloudflare, it went live smoothly at didiktrisusanto.dev

Cycling

I realized never doing a routine exercise is bad for my body especially when you're working from home which only has very limited space for exercising. So I bought a bike because:

• Motorbike is used by my Wife because it was already WFO so I could use my bike to commute If I needed something

• Best choice for exercise and going outside for a while

• I love cycling since I was a kid

The bad news is my house is located on a high terrain. So even a 500-meter uphill ride is very exhausting. This became my challenge to how could I conquer the uphill road so I could gain better body fitness and I could freely go anywhere cycling without being afraid of the uphill road.

Started with a struggle riding uphill around 5-6km and after almost a year of exercising I accomplished almost 50km in a single ride session and of course with better fitness. I was surprised that based on my Strava statistics, my total riding distance this year is 446km and 5.456m of elevation gain!

New Role: Tech Lead

As a senior engineer in my team, it's quite common that I have a responsibility to break down many unclear software engineering problems and implement them with my team. But now the company decided to create a new role "Tech Lead", who has extended responsibilities to lead and direct the engineering aspect of the team. While the engineering manager will focus on the people and the growth part, the tech lead more focus on the technical and output deliveries.

Many folks with senior-level in each product group including me transitioned into tech lead. This is a great challenge to me because I wrote about finding the archetype a couple of months ago and Tech Lead role seems suitable for me. Even though I have Tech Lead position in my previous company, now the guidance and the objectives are clearer, which is nice.

Offline Team Bonding

Working remotely means you probably rarely meet your coworkers personally. Everything is virtually online. This is actually not a downside if we can keep working professionally and maybe prevent bias towards your teammates. However, bonding activities are still necessary to maintain good teamwork.

This year my team went to DUFAN!

Freedom: House Installment Finished

Finally debt-free!!

After 5 years, we finally managed to finish our house installment. We're happy to have our first house in Malang.

It's small but happy enough for us to live the day. Also a lot of cats!

So how's your 2023?