2022 - A Year in Review
2022 was a dense, eventful year, interleaved with Omicron and COVID-related logistics that became less intense here as the year went on. If 2020 lasted an eternity, 2021 and 2022 both rolled by in such a breathless flash I haven’t really chance to fully appreciate everything that happened.
Projects
After moving into our new place, we replaced a foundation wall and replaced a
big stretch of a concrete driveway with gardening space:
Zmagg designed the walkway and landscaping layout and is
writing up a post about how we went about landscaping our space.
How it started:
How it’s going:
Travel
I wrote up the Vancouver trip and you can read about it here!
Work: Span Drive
My big work project this year was a soup-to-nuts design, implementation, and certification of the “functionally safe” embedded system system powering Span Drive, an EV charger that dynamically adjusts charging rate based on your home’s electrical load.
Warning: flagrant generalizations and lack of references ahead.
My lesson from the last year: there are remarkably few consumer hardware companies and startups working to directly replace fossil-fuel-based consumer technologies with electric ones (“electrification”).
These include creating both electric equivalents (EVs and e-bikes vs internal combustion engines, cheaper induction stoves and heat-pump water heaters, etc.), introducing new new product categories for microgrid management, making more reliable public EV charging infrastructure, or supporting the booming US residental solar industry. If you’re a Bay Area software engineer looking to join the clean energy industry, your options are largely behemoths like Tesla, SolarEdge, Enphase, Rivian, etc.
Given this — as well as the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act — it’s actually really surprising how many climate-focused startups are working on really indirect solutions_ such as creative carbon accounting, carbon finance, monitoring, and monitoring of electric assets (like EVs). Some of these efforts seem really tenuous ground truthing to real climate-related outcomes.
On a contrasting note, check out this amazing EVSE built-into a London street lamp:
Media, Books, Reading, etc.
I read a lot fewer books than Zmagg. I don’t keep a GoodReads or other list of books I read, but these are the ones I remember finishing:
- Silas Marner (George Eliot)
- Means of Ascent (Robert Caro)
- A Place of Greater Safety (Hilary Mantel)
- Laudato Si, Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality: On Care for Our Common Home (Pope Francis)
My technical reading this past year was almost entirely related to work:
- The Definitive Guide to ARM Cortex-M0 and Cortex-M0+ Processors (Joseph Yiu)
- Understanding Digital Signal Processing (Richard Lyons)
- Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces (Arpaci-Dusseau)
- Rust Programming Language (Blandy, Orendorff, Tindall)
- Renovation, 5th Edition (Litchfield and Harley)
Most played music and radio:
Movies, etc.:
Food
I’m excited to do a lot more new cooking in 2023 than I did in 2022. After three years, we finally got off the wait list for the Rancho Gordo Bean Club. I signed up in 2022 and apparently totally forgot 😅! If you want to come over and eat beans in 2023, send me a message!
Notable household experiments and staple from 2022 included:
My favorite restaurant meal of 2023 was Mari Vega’s Mesoamerican tasting menu at the Lord Stanley Turntable. My favorite things from this were a plum chamoy and this amazing cod baked into a soft clay mold of a fish.
They baked the molds at a pottery studio nearby and you had to pull it apart to get at the fish!
