#171 — End of 2021 Special

Dec 31, 2021

It’s the end of another year, and it’s time to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

The Plague

I’ve still not caught it.

In fact, I’ve not caught anything this year. No office colds or anything like that: I think the only time I’ve been ill since this all started was when I came down with shingles in September 2020. It turns out that staying at home, avoiding nonessential travel, and wearing a mask when I do go out, is a good way to not get sick.

I’ve not spent this year totally isolated. I’ve visited old friends and met up with new ones, other than working from home, it’s been about as social a year as usual. It’s just that my “usual” is everyone else’s “not much”.

Work

This whole year I’ve been tech leading the accounts team. We’ve gone from only having the Brexit checker live to… only having Notifications live. Well, ok, we also migrated to the proper cross-government auth system and made a bunch of changes to GOV.UK to make it feasible to implement account functionality.

So, while there’s been a lot of changes behind the scenes, it would kind of be nice if we’d launched more features.

I’m still somewhat struggling with being a good tech lead: the team relies on me quite a lot which is good in one way but bad in another, as it means that if I’m off for whatever reason, everything slows down. I’ve been trying to improve my communication and planning so that my head is less essential.

This year I’ve had a couple of pay rises. We moved to a new pay framework back in 2019, which is based on self-reporting how your skills hold up against a standard framework (subject to line manager approval). So of course this just motivates you to go and do things to get evidence for that skill, to get more money, and then to stop doing that thing if it’s not really directly relevant to your day to day work. Once you’ve demonstrated competency in a skill, you always have it.

It’s a slightly flawed system, but a beneficial one.

Finance

It’s been another good year financially. Working from home, and not commuting, has saved me hundreds of pounds a month.

With the savings from not commuting, and the additional income from payrises, I’m now investing a sizeable chunk of my take-home pay, and my savings rate over the last few months has been close to 40%. In November I hit the very nice milestone of having two years expenses saved / invested: not quite financial independence, but getting there.

I also ditched my emergency fund and updated my personal finances memo.

Reading

This year I read 63 books, a bit less than last year’s 94. So here’s what I read this year, by category:

My top three books read in 2021 are:

Gaming

Last year I started a second group, and this year I joined a third. At this rate in four more years, I’ll be playing or running a game every single night. So right now my games are:

The D&D 5e, Pulp Cthulhu, Wolves of God, and FAE games from last year have all come to an end. This year I’ve also played or ran short games of Troika!, Genesys, Godbound, and Lady Blackbird.

I’m running the Ars Magica and Traveller games. They’re both going well, though the Ars Magica game is a lot of work and we’re likely going to end it after four or five more sessions.

I got into Traveller by watching Seth Skorkowsky’s review / overview series and first ran a one-shot of it in late 2020. Now we’re doing a full sandbox campaign (set in the Trojan Reach sector) which, so far, has been focussed on trading and doing small jobs, but is potentially heading towards space piracy, which would be fun. I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes.

I also started an RPG blog, Look What the Shoggoth Dragged In, which I’m hoping to write more for in the next year.

Miscellaneous

In late 2020 I started tracking my time. Well, in late 2021 I stopped. After almost a year I decided that it wasn’t worth the effort and introduced some poor incentives, and so I decided to drop it.