by Alex Vidrean
Twenty-Twenty Won
The new year celebration just passed, that's if you even celebrated.
Do you remember the celebration from 2019 to 2020? I bet you were excited, tipsy, or at least optimistic for the new grand 2020 year. Looking in retrospect, you kind of didn't expect all of what came next, right? It's like "Oh boy if I even knew what I was celebrating for …".
And now, we're in 2021! 🎉 Yeah, a fresh start, new aspirations, let's do everything differently now.
It's exactly as it was 1 year before and again you don't know for sure what is to come. Maybe it's just like 2020, but on steroids or it's [insert here a good year for you] all over again, who knows. Anyway, instead of bashing on 2020 and accusing it of being the WORST YEAR EVER (which objectively it kind of was), let's just try to celebrate the victories we've achieved during this special time of our lives.
I mean, we are here talking, so we survived 👏. Congrats to you, you magnificent bastard 🍻!
New colleagues
Less time with each other, more of each other
We multiplied. Yay. This year we've got 5 new colleagues who joined us and started working with us on our continued mission of Passionately Building IT Together.
And while unfortunately a lot of schools were closed and business not being business as usual, we even managed to hold an internship, which of course you can read more about in our related blog post.
You can check our whole happy squad right here, but come back afterward, we still have some things to discuss.
Work from home
Less time at work, more work at home
Working from home might be a dream come true for some, or a slow slippery slope into all-day pajamas and slippers, breakfast for lunch again kind of routine for me others.
Either group you were a part of, you might have been pressured to learn a new skill, or get a new hobby, or read that 1 book per month new year resolution you always make. We feel you.
It was the same for us, so we did what we don't do better and tried bettering ourselves.
- Started cooking and creating real feasts (and not for instant gratification on social media, this was the real deal)
- Quit some nasty habits (like not eating before going to work)
- Joined the awesome Moto Community ✌
- Started spending more time together (zoom coffee breaks, zoom game nights) remote for starters
- And those who enjoy it, got to work from home as much as they wanted to
Yeah, all of this was nice, but once the warm weather started coming and we wanted to step it up a bit.
Travel
Less travel, more cabins
Remember travel?
Whatever travel it is for you, it was definitely not easily doable in 2020.
So when you cannot travel, what do you do? You travel to a closer location because that's not technically traveling, It's just going somewhere ;)
And when you are confined to work from home for such a long time (again, might be a blessing in disguise for some), you appreciate much more going somewhere. So we took every opportunity we could and we started renting cabins, doing barbeques, going fishing, spending after-work quality time together.
When in previous years we were all just waiting for the "Company Team Building" to get together, this year we just started being proactive in that direction.
Sports
Less leaving the house, more movement
As you are looking at these pictures you might have noticed that if we are not the fittest bunch of IT specialists, then we are somewhere there in the fit people spectrum.
It's just the inspiration we draw from each other and our way of working that pushed us towards a healthier lifestyle (as healthy as possible when having a few McDonalds close by).
The pandemic restrictions didn't leave this aspect of lifestyle untouched, so instead of embracing the couch we did what we could to keep the movement going with:
- Daily Push-up challenges / Online classes
- Once leaving the house was a thing we went straight to the basketball court and kept doing that almost weekly
- We even went for some more extreme stuff like Enduro and Kayaking (nothing was stopping us)
- And all of this while still going to GYM for the WIN 💪
Yeah, 2020 was objectively a tough year, and it affected a lot of lives, but with all this going I think it's important to also count our wins for the year and use them further because they are the result of us dealing with the unexpected.
Let's see what you got 2021!