2022 in Review

Let’s get it straight: it’s been the worst year of my life. And I shouldn’t even complain as me and my family are safe and healthy. Many Ukrainians are not. The war has changed everything.

I can no longer see my family. All our plans for this year were discarded.

And Ukrainians are in an even worse situation.

I feel helpless that I can’t change anything.

…

Still, here are some things I want to remember about 2022.

Work

Besides usual activities at Toolbox App, I’ve released my gettext compatible Kotlin multiplatform library. The rest of the time I was mostly busy with the consequences of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the JetBrains’ exodus from Russia.

Moving away from Google services

I’m gradually migrating away from Google services. The main reason for this is to remove the single point of failure.

Once I realized that if my Google is blocked, I’m screwed. All the services I was using were registered on my Gmail address. I’ve immediately migrated the most critical ones to my own e-mail address on this domain.

However, that e-mail was still hosting on Google servers, because it was free for the last 10+ years. But Google suddenly decided to discontinue their free legacy plan and start charging users. And they don’t even provide them with all features of regular Gmail accounts.

So, back in March, I decided that if I need to pay for hosting my email, I choose some other provider. To support diversity and to decrease the dependency on a provider which is known for shutting down its services.

Since then, Google has changed their minds and allow non-commercial use of their e-mail services on a free legacy plan. Too late. I’m now using Migadu for my e-mail and haven’t had any issue with them so far.

This topic definitely deserves a separate post.

Keyboard

After trying mechanical keyboards for the first time last year, I was ready to build my dream keyboard. Just look at this beauty.

Well, it deserves a separate post too!

Entertainment

To stay sane in these crazy circumstances, I tried not to open my laptop at home as much as possible. Instead, I spent time playing with kids, hiking, and, of course, watching TV and playing games.

PlayStation

This year I platinumed four PlayStation games: Spiderman, Spiderman: Miles Morales, Horizon Forbidden West, and Ghost of Tsushima. And I enjoyed every minute playing them.

Less so with Cyberpunk 2077. I have been waiting for it, but when I finally get my hands on, I couldn’t get beyond the first mission. Don’t know why, just not my thing.

I’m still looking forward to playing The Witcher 3 on PlayStation 5. Hope it will be better than Cyberpunk.

TV and movies

I remember only a few good movies I watched this year. First, Everything, everywhere all at once created a better multiverse movie than Marvel. Who would have thought? Second, Bullet Train reminded me of the best Guy Ritchie movies.

On TV and streaming there were quite a lot of premieres and finales this year:

• Better Call Saul and Ozark end in a way they should have ended.

• The Lord of the Rings The Rings of Power were so beautiful and yet so boring. On the contrary, I didn’t expect much from The Game of Thrones House of the Dragon, and it surpassed all expectations, despite having a much smaller budget.

• The last but not least, The Peripheral delivered a lot of fun, but also a huge disappointment. We need to wait for the second season to understand what’s going on there.

LEGO

I’ve been playing LEGO a lot when I was a kid. Lately I’ve discovered lots of adult-oriented LEGO sets. Everything from the Statue of Liberty to a bonsai tree, from the DeLorean DMC-12 (yes, that car from the Back to the Future) to the Tallneck from the Horizon universe. The last two I enjoyed building this year.

Looking forward to 2023

Like in previous years, I hope the next year will be better than this. Sigh.

Anyway, I have a lot of plans. I want to get back to running and triathlons. I have an interesting keyboard project already in the works. I’m excited about visiting KotlinConf for the first time. I have a huge backlog of PlayStation games.

Everything will be good.

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