Year in Review
I’ve completely neglected my blog, even though I initially planned to write here fairly regularly. Oh well - a year-end review post is a good opportunity to briefly describe the events that have happened recently.
Work
This year I got to try myself in a leadership role. Towards the end of last year, my then-manager decided to quit and start his own business, and I took his place. Initially I planned to manage for half a year, and then see how it goes - in the end it stretched out a bit longer. Ultimately, I was doing managerial work for about eight months. After this time, I can draw several conclusions:
I’m quite capable of doing this kind of work, although there are many things that can and should be improved. Much of the success is thanks to the team - without them everything would have been much worse.
I think I prefer doing development over managing it. Discussions, reading and writing emails, “putting out fires” and other org tasks took up quite a lot of time - more than I would have liked. Ideally, I’d like to have a time distribution between development and org work of at least 70 / 30 percent, but it turned out to be exactly the opposite.
After certain events that occurred in the company, I decided to change jobs and since mid-year I’ve been working as a Python programmer at Mail.ru Group. The working conditions here are noticeably different for the better - it’s very clear that the company cares about its employees. There are, of course, some downsides, but there are plenty of upsides too - half a year flew by almost unnoticed. Time, energy and desire to work on my own projects have appeared again.
Travel
During the May holidays we went on a bus tour around Europe. We visited Warsaw, Prague, Munich, Vienna and Krakow. In some cities we had very little time: in Warsaw, Vienna and Krakow we were there for about 3-4 hours each. I liked Prague and the castles near Munich the most, and in Warsaw I had the most delicious coffee I’ve ever tasted.
Between quitting MegaFon and my first working day at Mail.ru Group I had a free week, which we spent in Kaliningrad. It turns out that in mid-summer the Baltic Sea hasn’t quite warmed up yet and swimming is rather chilly - apparently you need to go to the sea in August. Kaliningrad itself was nice - quite beautiful, green, and it’s hard to go in any direction without stumbling upon historical ruins.
In September we went to Anapa for friends’ wedding. The sea was relatively warm, but the wind around it was the opposite, and overall the weather was somewhat disappointing. And the tourists there, who are (surprisingly) exclusively Russian, don’t add to the desire to go there for a vacation. On the other hand, we weren’t there for the sea anyway ;)
During the November holidays we visited Yaroslavl. We didn’t see anything particularly noteworthy there, just an ordinary provincial Russian city, except maybe the locals’ love for strange-looking balconies will remain in our memory and photos :) We walked a lot, changed the scenery - not bad for a three-day trip.
Overall, seeing two seas in one year is better than I expected.
I think I’ll refrain from making plans for next year - it’s better to describe them as I accomplish them ;)