📅 2022 in review

As the year winds down, it's the perfect time to reflect on everything I've accomplished. It's also a good time to see if I lived up to my goals for 2022, so let's get into it!

👩‍❤️‍💋‍👨 marriage

My wife and I are always striving for the best marriage, and this year was no exception. We spent a lot of time at the beginning of the year playing games together. Even though we bought plenty of adult games, the one that turned out to be the most fun for us was Trouble! It was just the right amount of skill, luck, and competition to keep us on the edge of our seats.

They say that year seven is the hardest year of marriage, and I would say that proved true for us. I traveled more than normal for conferences and work, and it was a big adjustment for us. Our monthly marriage checkups always helped us share how we felt and they turned into great conversations about how we could improve.

👨🏼‍💻 products

I had a goal to build two SaaS products this year to earn some passive income. I started by building a SaaS application template with Next.js. Then I tried to find some product ideas on Twitter and got nowhere.

What SaaS product could I build that would make your life easier?
— Brad Garropy (@bradgarropy) May 20, 2022

After researching a few of my own ideas and hitting brick walls, I lost interest in this goal. I think this process burned me out a little, and caused me to disconnect for the summer. I am still interested in building some kind of SaaS application, but this time with my Remix starter. I plan to pick up on this goal again in 2023.

📚 books

I had planned to read six books this year, one every other month. But I went above and beyond this goal and wound up reading nine books this year!

Not only that, I got super into it and ordered five more books that I'm planning to get through next year. But I did feel like the every other month schedule was a little constricting, so I'll be more free with starting new books.

🏡 bradgarropy.com

I successfully completed a major overhaul of this website in February. I migrated to Next.js and switched hosting over to Vercel. This resulted in faster builds, better web vitals insights, improved TypeScript support, and an awesome developer experience.

However, I was captivated by Remix and Tailwind this year and I've already got branches in progress to migrate to those tools. So who knows, maybe we'll see another rewrite of my website in 2023!

📺 youtube

Although I only produced three videos in 2022, my channel crossed 1000 subscribers and reached almost 3000 watch hours. It turns out that getting monetized was harder than I thought, but I'm sure if I release a few more videos next year I'll get there.

💰 side income

I set a goal to reach $1000 of side income, and completely smashed it by earning $3400.40 last year! I earned money from multiple different sources such as:

Creating multiple streams of side income will continue to be a major goal of mine in 2023, and I'd like to see the number of income streams and the total income grow year over year.

✅ productivity

This goal changed quite a bit through the year. I completely transitioned my productivity system to Todoist in early 2022, and even paid for the Pro plan. I was happy with Todoist, but then I moved from a Google Pixel 6 to an iPhone 14 Pro in December.

I realized that the default Reminders application could cover all of my use cases for free. Now I've got a great productivity system in place with the Reminders app that syncs across all of my Apple devices.

🦉 duolingo (bonus)

Before our trip to Sayulita I wanted to brush up on my Spanish, so I downloaded Duolingo. Needless to say, I got super into it. Now almost a year later, I've practiced Spanish nearly every day, and I can have fluent conversations with my Mexican in-laws!

Because my children are bilingual, my ability to speak Spanish is becoming more and more important. That being said, this is a habit I want to continue for many years to come.

🎤 compressed.fm (bonus)

This year I was fortunate enough to be invited to co-host multiple episodes of Compressed.fm with James Quick and Amy Dutton. I absolutely loved being back on a podcast as a host, and valued the opportunity to work more closely with James and Amy.

🎬 conclusion

Although I failed to create any real products, I felt like 2022 turned out to be a super successful year not only monetarily, but also because of the relationships I strengthened. I also loved how a few things popped up that really stuck with me through the year, like my dedication to Spanish.

I feel like 2023 will cement my ability to generate income from side projects, and cement my ability to speak Spanish fluently. I also hope that 2023 is a year of redemption for me when it comes to building and selling web applications.