A cartoon depiction of the author, wearing a hoodie and smiling motd.co

2015 In Review

The end of 2015 was a blur; basically every week from Thanksgiving on had something going on. While it seems like most have already handled reviewing the year during the course of December or within the first few days of the new year, this is a little bit "late", I suppose. But it's still fresh in my memory, and it was a very full year.

That said, the year came and went very quickly, all things considered. We had no major life changes after moving into a new apartment in mid-January, where we've been much happier than our tiny old apartment on Second Avenue.

I spent the whole year under the employ of Vox Media, after starting there in 2014. My team accomplished some pretty significant things, which I will remain unfortunately vague about, but I will say that I'm proud of what we did and I believe that it continues to prove to our company leaders and some of our business partners that we're doing the best work in our field. We're also growing as a company very quickly, which has been exciting to see! I feel somewhat able to help teammates explore how we can maintain our culture and communications because of my past experiences working at bigger places, and I hope I can continue participating in that. A small group of us even built an internal site used to share team folklore, which I'm really proud of and hoping to add more features to in 2016.

Gretchen and I got to do a lot of traveling around the country. We visited friends in Nashville, Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, and Chicago; spent some time in the suburbs of Boston (for a wedding) and in Indiana (for the holidays), and I got to go to Portland by myself in September to attend this year's XOXO conference. If I had planned ahead, this would have been a good year to enroll in TSA Precheck, but overall our travel went extremely smoothly, so I guess we were fortunate.

As far as hobby projects go, I have mixed feelings about how the year went. I made some pretty neat stuff—and redesigned my personal website to feature my work—but it all falls within a fairly narrow category of work, and I spent a lot of effort rewriting or maintaining old projects that in hindsight I kind of wish I had just let go. I've also found that I haven't been writing much of anything, whether it's fully-formed things meant to share with other people, personal journal entries, or even just scribbling ideas into notebooks in ways that foster creativity. I spent a lot of time on Twitter, and while I really liked hanging out with people and joking around on it, in 2016 I'm looking to reclaim some of that time in the interests of brainstorming more ideas and working on things.

I'm hopeful for 2016 to be a good year: In some ways, it feels like it was good for 2015 to be a fairly stable year with gradual growth in terms of how I think of things and what I do. It sets me up to start 2016 with high spirits and try to accomplish some things I've wanted to for a while. I'm always wary of "resolutions" or calendar year-based decision making, but I'm going to keep my eye out for good opportunities to improve myself and my life in the first half of the year in a way that I hope will be good for me, my family, and my friends.