Good things happening to me in 2020

Volunteering

Poster for “Frankenstein” with a disconnected body levitating above mountains — Posters for the two plays

Poster for “The Day War Came” with a chair in an otherwise empty room — Posters for the two plays

Two children’s theatre groups that I volunteer for staged very good dramatisations of “Frankenstein” and a poem about refugees.

Work

I was allowed to work from home for one day a week. Then five.

I passed an exam in project management in software development.

My employment contract got renewed until June 2022.

On the job, I did most of the work of re-structuring a software application, making it three times faster and about 20 times less energy-intensive. Because I’m now the one developer on the project (which is a program to detect mistakes in Word documents), I have also been responsible for several new features, maintenance issues, and bug fixes.

As coursework for my apprenticeship, I wrote a 10,000-word treatise about my work on the document-reviewing program. This is longer than my university dissertation, but I still want to add to it.

Birdlife

A male and female mandarin duck swimming — Mandarin ducks and chiffchaff

A small brown bird on a branch — Mandarin ducks and chiffchaff

While walking the dog, I was surprised by several mandarin ducks on the river Dee. I hadn’t seen any since a visit to the Martin Mere nature reserve in Lancashire in 2008!

I’ve also been on some nice walks with my parents.

Other unusual birds I saw this year included: chiffchaffs, whitethroat, grey wagtails, shelducks, stonechat, goldcrests, green woodpecker, teal, kingfisher, and sparrowhawk.

Personal coding

In 2019, I made myself a personal website. In 2020, I redesigned it. It looks a lot nicer, I learnt a good amount, and I have a fairly clear idea of further improvements I can make.

In early 2016, I started compiling Latin vocabulary into a spreadsheet and wrote Excel formulae to pick out words I was interested in, such as rhymes. In mid-2019, I made a website to let anyone access this information — it’s essentially an online rhyming dictionary for Latin. In 2020, I added a couple more big features. Visitors can now search for Latin vocabulary from the English meaning, and they can also search for Latin words from a pattern of letters and/or scansion. I have further big plans for how to reduce my reliance on Excel for this project.