2020 is almost upon us and I thought it doesn't hurt to take some time to reflect on the year gone by. I remember starting the year with this feeling that I was rushing towards something but didn't know what that something was. Looking back, the theme of this year as the title suggests was -

Take a step back and breathe

The start of the year was fairly uneventful. In the summer, I decided to move on from my first Full-time Software Dev job at Top Hat after almost two years of working there. All the tech learnings aside, I feel fortunate to have worked with some of the smartest and most chill folks on my team, pod.

For the first time during the Canadian summer I wasn't working full-time and was in the country. Additionally, I moved into a new neighborhood around the same time so it was great timing to go out and explore the city. Some of my favorite restaurants:

• Pai: Everything is great! I wonder if I am their most loyal patron
• Porchetta: Amazing sandwiches, OG fried chicken is a must
• Byblos: Expensive but worth it. Their Duck Kibbeh and Lamb Shoulder are 11/10.

Summer was also about exhausting all the coffee shops in downtown as I worked on my side projects. Film Cafe, Le Gourmand (their walnut chocolate cookie is the truth) and Page One Cafe were my favorites. I revamped this site using GatsbyJS, TypeScript and also spent time delving deeper into the Serverless framework for building scalable data processing pipelines. Another highlight of my summer was getting back to playing tennis regularly for the first time since grade 9. It was refreshing to forget about time and play all day just like during high school days.

In Autumn, I started a new job at BenchSci as a Full-stack Engineer. I've been at BenchSci for three months now and am absolutely loving the pace of work, learning. We do a lot of work with ElasticSearch and it has been a rewarding experience struggling, collaborating, learning to write queries for complex use cases.

What else did I do in my spare time this year? I didn't watch a lot of TV but here are my top picks for the year:

• The Crown
• Inside Bill's Brain
• Mindhunter

I got the chance to read a little more this year which hopefully I can take into the new year. Here are my top picks:

• Educated by Tara Westover: A quote from the book that stuck with me

  The most powerful determinant of who you are is inside you.

• Zero to One by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters: I particularly enjoyed reading the chapter titled Last Mover Advantage which touches on the areas to focus as a "last mover" to ultimately build a monopoly.
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

And that was my 2019. Here's to hoping 2020 will be even better, cheers!