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.

2021 was quite the year, in that I had my first professional fiction sale! That story is eligible for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Award, among others, and is on the Nebula Recommended Reading list.

And, since this is my first pro-market publication, I am eligible for the Astounding Award for Best New Writer.

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.