Timeline
🇫🇷 January 19–24th. I went to visit my family in France, in a chalet somewhere in the Alps. We typically celebrate the winter holidays in January for logistics reasons.
👩 February 16th. I got hair transplants! I had been struggling a bit with my hairline since I transitioned. While it wasn’t bad, it was a bit higher than I wanted, so I decided to get it adjusted. It was a long day of surgery and painkillers.
🥴 February 17–28th. I was on sick leave for about 2 weeks following the surgery. The first week was really rough with face swelling and general tiredness. I also had to sleep sitting down for over a week since I couldn’t lie on my side, and the scar on the back needed to heam.
🇪🇸 April 7–10th. I had a work trip in Barcelona with the Scilife leadership team.
🇩🇪 April 17–18th. My best friend and I took a weekend trip to Lübeck, Germany for their birthday. We walked extensively throughout the city (~45km in 3 days!), gorged ourselves with nice food, and had some well deserved quality time. Also, Lübeck is a really nice city.
🇵🇱 May 8–11rd. My partner and I spent a long weekend in Warsaw, Poland. We had such a lovely time: the weather was generally great, the food was delicious, and Warsaw was a very pleasant city to hang out in.
🇪🇸 May 13–16th. Another work trip in Barcelona, this time both with the leadership team and then with the whole European team.
🇩🇰 August 27–29th. My partner and I went to Copenhagen with their mother to celebrate their birthday. We walked a lot around the city, had lovely dinners and spent some good quality time.
📍 August 29-31st. One of my best friends joined me in Copenhagen for our yearly trip to attend the Geoguessr World Cup. Just like the previous years, it was a blast!
🇫🇷 October 17–22nd. My mom went through hand surgery on October 16th, so my partner and I decided to go spend some time with her and my dad and help around the house for a few days. It was a really nice trip, getting to spend some quality time with my parents.
🌱 November 15th. This day marked 7 years without eating meat and 6 years without fish.
🐈⬛ November 16th. After over a year since my dearest Lilith passed away, we finally got another cat. Nori, a small black British Shorthair (assumed to be at least), an absolute menace to the plants and a little purring bundle of joy.
💻 December. I participated in Advent of Code again this year. I think I did okay. Like any other year, a few problems I can’t really solve, but it’s alright. I’ve also toyed around with doing some exercises in Rust, which was good practice.
👋 December 31st. The last day of the year is also my last working day at Scilife, after 15 months of challenging and rewarding work as a VP of Engineering. Looking forward to what’s next. :)
Highlights
- 🚶♀️ I have done an average of 7,000 steps per day over the year, or close to 2,000 kilometers in total — according to my health tracker (Samsung watch).
- 💤 I slept a little over 8 hours a night on average (typically between midnight and 8am). Very happy with having a consistent and healthy sleep schedule.
- 💬 I’m on a 2400+ days streak on Duolingo, mixing German and Dutch. I started the year with German, and switched back to Dutch throughout the year.
- 💻 I picked up Rust as a side project, doing more backend and database work — thankfully with a healthy support from coding assistants like Cursor.
- 👀 I started the process to legally change my first name. I didn’t finish it yet, that’s for next year. But good progress!
Lowlights (kinda)
- I haven’t written a single article for this blog this year (if you exclude this one). I feel I have less things to write about since taking on more leadership roles.
- No new country on the map for my this year. Although I’ve gone on a few European trips, it was to destinations I had previously been to.
Onto next year. :)