American Dialect Society declared “dumpster fire” as the word of the year. And that’s how most will remember 2016. But while demotivating and fake news dominated our feeds, there’s no need to be discouraged. In a lot of ways, 2016 was a great year.

It’s been a good year for me personally too. This is a a yearly short horn-trumpeting summary of it. In no particular order:

• My first full year as Head of Engineering at Vinted. Five years ago I would’ve laughed at the idea of me being in a leadership role. Oh, how the times have changed. I’ve joined Vinted hoping that I’ll receive ample opportunities to learn and grow. I’ve been very lucky to have that and more.

• We went through a couple of big changes at Vinted. Due to them, I’ve experienced some of the most emotionally taxing weeks of my professional life. The right long-term decision is not always the easiest decision.

• For the first time in my life, I travelled outside Europe. And did it multiple times. I’ve visited my brother in Kazachstan. I’ve visited @jaudrius in Singapore. And I vacationed with my girlfriend in Japan. I would heartily recommend everyone to broaden their horizons. Just getting a surface-level familiarity with a significantly different culture is enlightening.

• I had amazing opportunities to grow as a speaker this year. As usual, I did some talks at local usergroups & internal events. But I also spoke at 3 conferences in Vilnius (LOGIN, DevOps PRO, Build Stuff). If that weren’t enough, I presented at Continuous Lifecycle in Mannheim, Build Stuff Ukraine and did a Carousell TechTalk in Singapore. Previously, I’ve only spoken once in another country. That was at a Usergroup in Estonia. This year, I’ve added 3 more countries and those conferences paid for my travel expenses.

• I love podcasts. This year I’ve participated in one - Ruby Rogues #251. I was very nervous, but it all turned out ok, mostly due to amazing hosts.

• Read 29 books. I’ll highlight 3 of them. The Sandman Omnibus, Vol. 1 is the heaviest book I’ve ever read. Not in terms of content, but in terms of weight. It’s a masssive hardcover tome of more than 1000 pages. In terms of content, it’s a triumph. The Effective Engineer might become the first book I recommend to software engineers at the start of their career. And if you can read just one book about public speaking, make it Confessions of a Public Speaker. Lots of practical tips mixed with a great sense of humor.

• Kept that beard I grew last year. No cat yet, though.

• Most of the work on Pronto this year was done by contributors. I still contributed to open source, but less than the 3 previous years.

Did you know that 2011 and 2017 is a sexy prime pair? 2017, here we go!