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Each passing year teaches us something. I think, 2021 will be the year we as a family learned resilience. We've made good progress on the foundation pillars(work, health, and family) of our life.

Work

2021 officially marks a decade since I took up Software Development as a profession. Though I have been programming since high school, I'm still enjoy it. Programming languages I use might have changed, but never has my interest.

Books

I read about 12 books in 2021

• வீரயுக நாயகன் வேள்பாரி, தொகுதி 2 (வீரயுக நாயகன் வேள்பாரி, தொகுதி 2) by Su.Venkatesan
• HDFC Bank 2.0 by Tamal Bandyopadhyay
• Fooled By Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
• How to Live: 27 conflicting answers and one weird conclusion by Derek Sivers
• The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development by Chad Fowler
• So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Cal Newport
• The Richest Man In Babylon by George S. Clason
• Masterclass with Super-Investors by Vishal Mittal
• Food Rules by Michael Pollan
• No Limits: The Art and Science of High Performance by Mukesh Bansal
• Gamechanger: Forget Start-ups, Join Corporate and Still Live the Rich Life you want by Pattabiraman

Donations

This year I donated to the Free Software Foundation, Wikipedia, and Mozilla.

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Personal

I made 4 significant changes with respective to finance.

1. I used cash over cards. It gave me control over my spending behavior by giving psychological feedback on my cash flow for a given month.
2. I disabled ATM cash withdrawal for my credit cards and have enforced 3-digit limits for contactless payments.
3. I currently hold a few blue chips and a couple of mutual funds.
   1 - Sensex index fund
   1 - S & P 500 index fund for international diversification.
4. I had stopped investing in the ELSS mutual fund last year. I improved on it by opting for the New Tax regime. This is to decouple my long-term investments from tax planning.

Health

I got our family(including parents and in-laws) vaccinated 100% with both doses. We accidentally discovered a major health challenge for my mother-in-law when we did a master health checkup. Since it was an early diagnosis, we had ample time for treatment and recovery.

Family & Self

The biggest highlight of the year came when we realized that we were on a journey of welcoming a new member to our family. We'd wonderful memories in welcoming Dhruvan. We wanted to recreate similar memories this time as well but unfortunately, we ran into unforeseen medical challenges that required frequent in-hospital observations.

Switching between work and attending to medical emergencies took a toll on my mental health. Fortunately, Working from home helped me to strike a balance between working and taking care of my family. It has helped us to stay together in difficult times and be supportive of each other.

Aaradhana, our baby girl was born during such tough times. All the struggles we endured, vanished the moment we received her for the very first time on our hands. With her, our family is now complete. We'll be ever grateful to God for her.

Dhruvan has started attending school this year virtually. He has neither visited nor has any idea how the physical school would be. But Lakshmi is going to great lengths in compensating for that with a lot of physical and social activities. He has started to do many things on his own just by observing us.

It warms my heart to see Dhruvan assist Lakshmi in taking care of his little sister, slowly fitting into his big brother's shoes. Time flies.

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Goals for 2022

1. Learn a business domain - Instead of learning technology, I wanted to learn a business domain.
2. Improve my eating habits - Read more books on this subject.
3. Be tech independent - Focus on improving backup.

I hope 2022 will be the year of abundance blessing for all of us.

Previously 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2014