This is a long post with a lot of content. A lot of it, on paper, is very good. I accomplished a lot of things and reached a few important milestones. And I have a lot of books, movies, podcasts, and whatnot to recommend. But these year-in-review posts are just as much for me as for anyone else. So, before we get to the good stuff, I’m going to complain.

I did, in fact, write a 2020 Year in Review post, but didn’t have the heart to finish it. Luckily, I’m in a slightly better state of mind this time around. This post will be a combination of the past two years. I’ll try to keep it brief.

Update: I am happily employed! I’m leaving this post up as a template for others.

I’m Alice Goldfuss, a Senior SRE/Infra/Systems engineer with years of experience working on high-throughput platforms at scale. I’ve been part of the larger tech community since 2015, and have driven industry-wide conversations around infrastructure design, incident response, on-call rotations, and team workflows. I’m a big believer in building tech that serves real user needs without burning out the engineers creating it.

With the spread of COVID-19, many tech companies are sending employees home to work remotely. As someone who has worked remotely for multiple companies, in different setups, I wanted to offer some assurances and tips for maintaining your mental health while adjusting to this new life.

This is a long post, but I hope it brings you some amount of comfort and support in the days ahead.

This will be a long post, because it was a long year.