Themes

Every year on my birthday, I reflect on the past year and set a theme for the next year.

The idea is simple — an overarching theme acts as a North Star and guides you in making microdecisions. To learn more about how I think about themes, read my blog post 2022 will be the Year of Teamwork. My themes, like all sections of this site, are open source and available on GitHub as raw markdown files. All thumbnails are generated using Stable Diffusion.

New yearly theme on January 1, 2024

Year of Gratitude

Theme for 2024

In 2024, I want to focus on the wellbeing of myself and those around me: I want to focus on my mental health and give myself time to exercise, introspect, and learn. I want to properly take Sundays off and spend more time with myself and my loved ones, and I want to see my personal trainer and my therapist with more regularity and review my goals frequently. Secondly, I want to actively practice gratitude to be more thankful for everything I have. I want to be more appreciative of the people in

New yearly theme on January 1, 2023

Year of Relationships

Theme for 2023

I want to improve my relationships with my work, myself, and my surroundings in my Year of Relationships: I want a healthy relationship with my work. I want to continue to work hard on my company. 2022 was my highest productivity year yet, and I don’t want that to change in 2023, while taking enough time off and maintaining a healthy balance. I also want to plan better and spend time in structured thinking. Secondly, I want a strong relationship with my body & min

New yearly theme on January 1, 2022

Year of Teamwork

Theme for 2022

Year of Teamwork stems from some of the issues I've been facing lately with delegation. Reflecting on my calendar in the past few months, I see that I've already started spending significantly more time on code review and planning than actually writing code than I used to this time last year, but it's not nearly enough. I still spend the majority of my time as an individual contributor, which is scaling very poorly.

New yearly theme on January 1, 2021

Year of Commitment

Theme for 2021

I didn't write a blog post about my theme in 2021, but here's an excerpt from my blog post 2022 will be the Year of Teamwork which summarizes my thinking behind this theme: My theme for 2021 was Year of Commitment. In a post-pandemic world, I decided to double down on long-term goals (work, health, and personal life), and after living in India for most of the year, I wanted to move back to the Netherlands -- but not alone this time. In the last quarter of

New yearly theme on January 1, 2020

Year of Long Term

Theme for 2020

I didn't write a blog post about my theme in 2020, but here's an excerpt from my blog post 2022 will be the Year of Teamwork which summarizes my thinking behind this theme: 2020 was my Year of Long Term. I had just come back after living for a short while in the San Francisco Bay Area (after an exchange semester at Santa Clara University) and I knew that I'd be graduating from the University of Twente in 2020, so I had to decide where to fo