My 2020 awards
It’s time to recap this year. Contrary to popular belief, 2020 seems exciting to me. I am very positive about the results of the year despite the difficulties many of us faced. It made me stronger and brought me new sources of inspiration. So I’d like to thank the year and give my awards for the things that changed my life.
Book of the Year
Patty McCord — Powerful
Among the books I started reading and completed this, it made the largest impact. Interestingly enough, Netflix culture in total turned into a controversial thing for me. Several things I would never do as they do. That said, I bumped into a bunch of exciting ideas and, what’s more, changed a few things at my work.
Conference of the Year
End of August, beach club, sea, relaxed atmosphere, discussion about front-end engineering, cozy place, friendly people. What could be better?
However, due to the pandemic, there are only 2 offline conferences I visited in 2020.
Talk of the Year
High Performance Remote: a How to Guide for Troubled Times
Katie Womersley gave an excellent keynote during CTO Craft Con sharing her Buffer’s experience in detail. Not the first time Buffer serves as a great example to learn and develop my company.
Insight of the Year
You can build a very close friendship out of the blue and forever.
Quote of the Year
The best experiments are those where you try to prove yourself wrong, like a good scientist tries to do
© Jurgen Appelo
Team Practice of the Year
It is a monthly company email I began writting to all Atola teammates where I share the latest company results, moods, and vision of the next month. I received unexpectedly warm feedback from my colleagues when I tried it first in May.
It gave more opportunities to understand where we are now and where we are moving toward. Understanding business and company’s vision is huge.
Design of the Year
Neuromorphic design system is simply gorgeous.
App of the Year
Hey email service by Basecamp
My wonderful time-saver this year. On top of that, it makes user experience with handling personal emails, newsletters, receipts way more pleasant than GMail.
Computer hardware of the Year
PlayStation 5
It’s a masterpiece for gamers. I cannot stop enjoying looking at it, let alone playing :)
Personal achievement of the Year
Weathering possible financial issues in my company.
I never faced such a threat, to be fair. There was a likelihood we would need to cut expenses at the end of spring as a last resort. It did not happen, though. I coped with the anxiety by sharing feelings with the close ones and building several possible models of the future.
We managed to recover sales at the same time fully. In the end, Atola wraps 2020 up with two salary raises for the whole R&D team.
Video game of the Year
The Last of Us. Part 2
It turned into the most emotional gaming experience in 2020. Ellie vs Abby storyline was a really new thing causing various feelings. No surprise, the game took the most of the awards during Game Awards 2020 ceremony.
In my head, the game had a competition though with Cyberpunk 2077, Death Stranding and Wasteland 3 :)
Ok, let’s stop it all at the playful award.
I am grateful to you for being so curious to reach the end of the blog. Happy holidays and don’t forget to embrace the moments of life!
Sincerely,
Vitaliy Mokosiy
