Well now that the year is ending, its time to do a final reflection.

A global pandemic happened; I got my first job as a developer after switching career paths and I had a final surgery to tie up any loose ends with my health lingering since 2019.

My take home lesson this year: to ignore what you can't control and just focus on what you can.

I stole this mindset from David Goggin's and took stoic practices to achieve my goals.

When the pandemic hit Canada and the lockdown was initiated, I immediately doubled my efforts in programming because deep down I felt like I was given a chance to catch up on lost time.

During this time, we had multiple lockdowns and entered the second wave of the pandemic in Q4. Social gatherings were put to a halt and living through this unprecedented time left little room for certainty.

What was interesting was that stock markets bounced back and soared despite unemployment. Tech companies seemed to be doing just fine when most of them transitioned over to fully remote work.

In addition, this was the first time in my life that I have ever seen a grocery stores completely out of stock on perishable items and most importantly, toilet paper.

Online shopping became bigger than ever with Amazon constantly being able to send parcels during the pandemic without delay. I am completely blown away how robust parcel delivery and how far logistics technology has come.

Positives

For many, this year has been extremely difficult. It is hard to focus on the positives when there's so much going on and I find that its important to keep our heads up.

I am hopeful for 2021 with the vaccine roll-outs. As a person of science, this has been exciting news.

Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are rolling out with promising results made from messenger RNA.

What's different about this type of vaccine?

Unlike traditional vaccines where they usually contain the weakened virus or purified proteins of the virus, the mRNA vaccine contains the genetic material that encodes for the viral spike protein.

It allows the body to encode these viral proteins directly in the body allowing the immune system to preview what the virus would look like without having the actual virus. This gives the body time to build antibodies so that it can be prepared for the real virus.

What makes this so exciting?

Well, traditional vaccine development is a tried and true method of vaccine technology but is very time consuming and cannot respond to a pandemic event fast enough.

mRNA vaccines eliminates long manufacturing process of traditional vaccines (this will be saved for another post).

But there are obvious cons such as a cold storage for the stability of mRNA since they are considered to be pretty unstable, which I hope will eventually be fixed in the near future.

All things considered, I think this pandemic will be a huge wake up call to the advancement of our healthcare and how we respond to such events. Living through this real-time has been very interesting.

Perhaps, a few years from now we can learn what our choices were regarding public health and see what we can improve so that we never have to experience something like this again.

FORWARD NOTE

I will no longer be doing Pomodoro reports going into 2021.

It has been a wild ride to see my year pan out with productivity reports and I am safe to say that this system has served me well to generate a career change with many monthly tweaks. The continuous reflections and improvements really helped me stay on track with my goals.

I look forward to learning without the pressure of having to generate my numbers at the end of every month.

I will definitely continue to improve my skills and change the approach on how to be productive for 2021.

My 2020 accomplishments:

Became employed as a Software Developer
Read 17 books
Finished a semester of French class
Learned a buttload about Webpack for work

My 2021 resolution:

Learn to take photos with X100F (new camera yay)
Continue to post on my blog
I would like to see more biochemistry stuff posted on my blog about the advancement of vaccines and explanation of new drug developments because I feel like I really owe 5 years of studying biochemistry to be a part of my identity and not have it feather away.

December Improvements

New microphone for Zoom calls
New keyboard (split Dygma keyboard) - the layers have significantly improved my workflow

In a world where remote work is now the new norm, I have been finding ways to improve my productivity and setup for the most optimal environment to split between studying and game time.