Favorites of 2022

Inspired by Fogus’ post, here are some of my favorite things I’ve discovered or rediscovered in 2022.

Articles

I’m happy I could read more this year, but I wasn’t good about keeping track of most of them, especially for the first half. That being said, here are some of my highlights, in no particular order:

• How Germany Remembers the Holocaust—This is a fantastic piece and a reminder of how much work we have to do.
• Professional Programming: The First 10 Years—My favorite technical blog post of the year. This post condenses so much insight, and I agree with nearly everything.
• A Secretive Hedge Fund is Gutting Newsrooms—An informative and scary piece. Newspapers play a critical role in our society, and we’ll continue to feel their decline.
• Understanding “Longtermism”: Why this Suddenly Influential Philosophy is so Toxic—Another informative and scary piece. Advocating for more research on how to best help the most people with your donations is good. However, it’s critical to have traditionally underrepresented people in the conversation on what help is needed.
• The Extreme Effort to Save Mexican Wolves from Extinction—Seeing how many are involved in this gives me hope.
• The Year in Pictures 2022—I always look forward to these. So much happened this year, and sometimes words can’t evoke the same emotion as pictures.

Newsletters

I’m a big fan of newsletters, and these were some of my favorites this year:

• Money Stuff—An extremely well-written newsletter by Matt Levine on current financial news.
• The Morning—A great daily summary of current events.
• The Pragmatic Engineer—A fantastic resource for anyone in the tech industry.
• Protocol’s Source Code—My favorite newsletter on technical news that, unfortunately, was recently discontinued.

Books

I was also able to read more books, trying to alternate between books relevant and not as relevant to my career. Here are a few highlights:

• Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making—My favorite “industry” book of the year. It was easy to read and full of insights.
• The Design of Everyday Things—I’ll never look at stove controls or faucets the same. This book does an excellent job of highlighting basic design principles and how they’re realized in everyday life.
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information—A fascinating book, equal parts informative and beautiful.

Software

My favorite piece of software I discovered this year is Obsidian. It’s a personal knowledge base app that has supplanted various note-taking apps I’ve used over the years. It’s not as simple as apps like Apple Notes or Bear, but the UX is super intuitive, and I’ve been pleased with my past six months of usage.

Music

Music continues to be a meaningful part of my life, and I listened to 65,596 minutes of music on Spotify. My top genre was still Indie Folk for at least the 3rd year.

Coincidentally, my top three artists of the year were stylized in all caps: EXES, MXMS, and BANKS. EXES was rediscovered, MXMS was newly discovered, and BANKS has been a top-5 mainstay for the past few years.

Podcasts

I don’t listen to many podcasts, but I highly recommend Everything is Alive. It’s hilarious.

Cooking

I did reasonably well on my goal of cooking without recipes this year. However, I still discovered a couple of them I recommend:

• Tomato soup—I replace the celery salt and sugar with a celery stalk and carrot.
• Burger buns—I make the buns a little smaller when shaping, around 85g instead of 100g.