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What (a) year? Yet again. Since Covid it seems like same year is going on. ☹️
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Year 2021 Roundup
In spite of a lot of things happening, this year flew. It seemed like we were just getting started with getting our life back to normal, then the huge second wave of Covid brought everything to a standstill. However, that didn’t stop us from achieving great things. I thought I may as well use this space to round up the personal and professional hits and misses from the year.
So here goes:
Switched workplaces after working for more than three years at Animal. While there, we worked on building Veu, a platform to hire photographers easily. Veu shut down earlier this year after lack of a product-market fit, nonetheless it was a great learning lesson.
Joined Nykaa — a marketplace for lifestyle products. My role involves looking at post-order experience and other properties like coupons/gift cards. I am also a part of building Nykaa’s design system. I got a chance to present it to more than 300 people comprising of PMs and Developers, including CTO.
Took a trip to Goa with close friends! Last trip with them was four years back while studying back in Europe.
Also took a trip with Family(Just the five of us). It’s a success metric because that too doesn’t happen very often.
Got Covid, got my family Covid too. Thankfully, everyone has recovered, vaccinated and are healthy.
Started spending somewhat dedicated time on writing.
Tried working from hills too. Everything else was great about it, except for the working part, mainly because of choppy internet.
Learnt lots of design system chops. I can sit for hours straight building components in Figma now. It has helped create a systems mindset, and also made me realise that there’s no single right way to build any form of systems.
Got myself Airpods Pro — first Apple product I bought for myself. In retrospect, I am grateful to be surrounded by generous people.
Tried to workout. A lot. Went ahead and hired a personal trainer too. Ultimately got back to running. Definitely have gotten better at running.
My brother and me got ourselves a Playstation 5; That helped in getting back into gaming after years. We used to have playstation one for the longest time, followed by a substandard PC, not meant for gaming, but we managed. Cut to now, after all these years, having a console feels so good.
Took varied freelance projects — ranging from updates to Shopify website to creating AR filters for Instagram. Most of them were out of my existing skillset. But I love working on such varied projects. That’s the only way I’ve learnt new skills.
That pretty much sums up the year. All in all, quite happy with the way it turned out. I would highly recommend this exercise — just writing things down the way you remember happened through the year. It’s a great way to look back and feel grateful to all the things you learnt, and unlearnt, and also to get excited for the next year.
Anywho, here’s me, Jaynish, signing off from Hyperlink for 2021. See you all in the coming year. Cheers!
Good Reads and Collections
Virgil Abloh FREE GAME — List of resources for brands and individuals who want to build their personal brand on how to get started and get it right, by none other than late Virgil Abloh.
Product thinking 101 — A primer to align yourself on what should everyone mean when they carelessly use the term ‘Product Thinking’.
UX lessons I wish I learned earlier — I was able to relate to quite a few of them.
Getting things done — A minimal GTD framework. While it’s built according how the author uses the app ‘Things’ to action the framework, I think it can be applied to any app or tool of choice.
Icon sets to up your design game
A customizable icon library with 1500+ pixel-perfect icons in it. Including Outline, solid and Monochrome styles.
1440+ beautifully crafted open-source 3D icons. You can use completely free and without attribution for personal or commercial project
The Simple and Definitive hand-crafted SVG Icons Library.
Handpicked set of icons — aggregated from renowned libraries like Feathericons
That’ll be all for this one. Hope you enjoyed reading this. Share it with someone who you think will like Hyperlink by clicking on the button below👇 . Stay safe and see you'll in the next issue!
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