2023 Year in Review

The past year was eventful.

I welcomed a new member of my family in late 2022, taking advantage of my employer's leave policy to spend some time with them. As before, I didn't get very much sleep (nor did my wife, or anyone else, really!) but the child is healthy and happy, so I couldn't complain.

While spending the first months of the year on paternity leave, I traded stocks and weathered some large swings in my portfolio - after a fairly large drawdown I decided to take a break and go back to indexing/treasuries.

During this time I continued to participate in homeschooling activities with my eldest. Homeschooling is already an enormous undertaking, but we managed and continued to make good progress, remaining several grade levels ahead of my eldest's biological age.

It occurred to me that most parents are "done" spending a great deal of time with their children after they hit school-ages. For many of those parents it allows them to return to developing their career full-time once their children are someone else's responsibility during the workday. I had made a conscious decision to not do that, for a variety of reasons, obvious to anyone who knows me and my child. Even today I grapple with whether this is the right decision or not, but for now, I'm going to continue to stick with it.

Returning to work was okay. I wasn't super thrilled about what I was working on, and figured that I would need to change things up sooner rather than later.

In August I quit. I wanted to take some time to decompress and spend time looking for something that I would enjoy doing. I interviewed at a few places, but wasn't adequately prepared. I resolved to improve in this dimension and spend more time doing family things.

After working on problems for a few months, I felt much more confident in my ability to navigate interviews, particularly jumping over the hurdles of technical interview modules.  Hundreds of applications and dozens of interviews later, I secured a couple of offers.

I still think that working on my personal projects is going to be more meaningful than being employed for a firm, but for now, I have a bit of runway and health insurance.

I have a feeling that 2024 is going to be fairly eventful as well, and I'm looking forward to it.