2021: Retro

New Year’s eve 2020 was a calm-ish end to the whirlwind that was 2020; with the emergence of treatments for COVID-19 and promise of vaccines becoming widely available in the coming year (if you’re fortunate enough to live in the global north). However for me in addition to some sense of relief, it brought on some nostalgic feeling as we helped a friend that was moving to Canada from New York get her stuff into the cab heading to the airport for a new life in a new year and I said to myself “I wish she was still in New York” ’cause I was still new-ish to New York at the time.

The finale of 2021 feels completely different from what 2020 felt including the heavens, as unlike last year whose finale started out with a pouring winter rain, the weather forecast says it going to be a cloudy day with a high of 11 degrees (Celsius) and a low of 9 degrees (Celsius) which is weird for winter but I’m not complaining (screams climate change internally..). Since I’m literally sitting here writing this on the last day of 2021, I hope I remember to share enough of what 2021 was to me.

Democracy

Like every system of governance that humans have devised to create a civilization, there are flaws. However, with democracy these flaws gets only exacerbated when we have bad actors who would prefer a quasi-democratic system that only serves their interest and beliefs without any care to how this might affect their fellow citizens.

We saw this in full display with the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6th when congress was certifying the electoral college results from the elections that was concluded in November 2020; with an angry mob of people storming the capitol armed with the unshaken belief that somehow the elections were stolen from the soon to be former president.

Which made me realize that democratic systems are only as strong as our collective belief in the system is coupled with willingness to accept the fairness of electoral results while working to make sure that we enable our democratic systems to perform their needed functions with the highest level of integrity that ensures no bowing to influence of the bourgeoisie and bad actors. Also raise your hands if you feel democratic governments need to be mandated by law to make voting accessible and available to everyone that is of a voting age.

Globalization

To sound cheesy like a newsreel from when colonization was still hot, In these modern times we are quickly realizing how much we have moved away from the Royal Niger Company carving out countries without any regard to tribal areas, while a regular person in Yorkshire (no idea why I chose this) remains unbothered, because they most likely have no knowledge of it nor do their livelihood changes even if they have that information, to a world where turmoils in a region can affect that food we eat because it doesn’t grow where we live.

This was more evident in the face of the lack of equitable distribution of the COVID-19 vaccines in the global south; which has led to the surplus of mutations which have thwarted the best efforts of the global north whom have consistently realize that you can’t just lock away the global south to protect yourselves from this variants/mutations.

I hope what we’ve seen so far with the migrant crisis, COVID-19 and climate crisis would help us realize that we all live on this same rock in space and we have to create more equity so that the entire planet can have a unified response to issues ranging from pandemics to climate crisis to ensure our mutual survival.

Family and Friends

As always, I’m immensely grateful for my family giving me the sense of belonging and support throughout the year and also my friends for being the awesome human beings they are.

I’m especially proud of one of my sisters for taking the bold decision to leave a shitty job in search of a better one that aligns near perfect with her career goals (there’s a large supply of shitty employers out there guys, we need to make sure they have no one to work for them until working conditions are improved). Also, one of my sisters started Law school after a stellar performance in her undergraduate Law program.

I’m also proud of the wins of my friends this year that ranges for from career progression to getting better employment conditions. I wish you awesome humans more wins in the coming year.

Finally, I’m grateful for the health of my parents, siblings and friends during the second year of the pandemic to which I say Alihamdulilah (Thank you God).

Cool Tech Stuff

This wouldn’t be complete without mentioning that I learnt Rust (programming language) this year and we built an incredibly fast GraphQL server to process data to be presented in a view-centric format.

I know that was a lot of nerd jargon but the summary is that Rust is so cool and if you are a programmer, you should check it out.

I’m also currently in the market for a hifi setup so I’m learning how to make the hifi system Airplay compatible so it can also play lossless streaming with a Raspberry Pi (I might write something about that, who knows?).

As 2021 approaches it’s final hours here in the East coast of North America, I know we might not have gotten everything we hoped for in the year (I sure didn’t) but we should be happy of the progress made around us and the little wins we’ve had, with the believe that 2022 would get us closer to where we hope to be. Thanks for reading and Happy New Year to you and tribe. Cheers!