But not to worry. This is probably just one shit year in a sequence of many more shit years to come. No sign of anything getting better in our near future and lots of trends pointing downward. Does it have to be like this? Not in any way but the majority of people are stupid and we all suffer together.

ACL

I had messed up my knee in late summer of 2022 during a climbing accident and after a bit of stalling figured out that having my ACL reconstructed would be a good idea.

The surgery was scheduled for February 23rd of 2023. That made a lot of the beginning of the year waiting to go into surgery which was followed by getting the surgery (a supremely weird experience), then recuperating from it at home for a couple of weeks and going back to work while doing physical therapy.

The chronology as far as I could piece it together:

• Feb 23rd, surgery
• Feb 25th, dismissed from the Charité
• Feb 27th, first outing
• March 9th, half weight bearing
• March 12th, 90 degree flexion
• April 10th, walking without crutches
• April 15th, cycled on the Christiania to get coffee
• June 16th, hospital check-up and cleared for cycling
• June 18th, first time road cycling

I got around mostly using ride shares during the first part which was fine. Turns out that I spent €474,55 on cab rides. A fair bit of that was thankfully reimbursed by my saved up mobility budget. I stopped taking cabs and started cycling on the electric Christiania on April 15th and then had my first outing on the road bike on June 18th.

During one of my final check-ups I told my physician at the hospital that if I didn’t rationally knew I had knee surgery, a lot of the time I couldn’t remember it. There was no noticeable difference anymore.

Of course there are still lots of situations where I notice it. The difference in strength between the two legs is still there and catching up very slowly. But that things are more or less back to normal is exactly what was promised.

I’m cleared to boulder again from around Easter if I choose to ever practice that sport again.

Kids

School

The kids started their school year with the German event they call the Einschülung, something that I disagree but I have no shortage of things that I disagree with about the German school ‘system’. That’s for another blog post.

The concept of the school and how classes are setup is very cool and the teachers are young and engaged. If everything worked the way it should, things would be amazing. The only issue is that most of the time there are staff shortages that fully destabilize whatever plans or schedules had been drafted. Those shortages stem from the deep dysfunction of the Berlin civil service and mostly because of a lack of funding for the schools that need it the most.

I’m not sure what we’re going to do there but for now we’re going to see if things look up in the second half of the year.

Let it be clear that Germany is a country that in no way values kids and their education.

Father

Related to our kids going to school, on their first school day morning my dad passed away suddenly in Amsterdam. We knew he was sick but we had no idea that things would progress this quickly.

The funeral was of course in Turkey so I took a flight to Amsterdam to be with my family and see him off and then flew to Turkey with my mother to do the burial in our village. It was the first time I was back in Turkey since 2015.

That was a difficult thing to do and after that everything is different.

Holidays

I heard the news about my dad’s illness on our holiday in the Alps this year. Our first family holiday in a long time and otherwise a resounding success.

After all the affairs were wrapped up we went to Amsterdam for a week during the fall break to keep my mother company and to have the kids experience a bit of the Netherlands again. It was good to be back and to see people we hadn’t seen in a long time.

Studies

I’ve continued the trend of unapologetically self-studying things that I fancy. I can recommend it.

Abstract Algebra

To continue to study category theory I diagnosed a gap I had on basic abstract algebra and tried to close it. I didn’t finish either of the textbooks (Fraleigh and Galian) because it seems that text books are bad for self-studying people.

I worked through a couple of YouTube lecture series on the topic which gave me much more value.

Sheaf Theory

Then I continued on and off in Sheaf Theory Through Examples which is a very mixed book. It’s nowhere near as good as Fong and Spivak’s book and now nearing the end it is getting very obtuse and inaccessible. I’ll finish this and then move on to Bartosz Milewski.

Japanese

I kept studying Japanese for most of the year and on a whim I registered for the December JLPT. During registration I had a choice where I could either go for the safe but relatively irrelevant N5 level or stretch myself and go for N4.

I picked N4 and that turned out to be a lot tougher than expected. I had to push very hard on both vocabulary and grammar to get to a point where I even felt it was worth going to Düsseldorf to take the test. The 1-2 months before the test I was cramming flash cards throughout the day and studying most evenings.

The test itself in Düsseldorf was even harder than I expected and I think that it’s unlikely that I passed it, but who knows… Results are due end of January.

Even if I don’t get the certificate, stretching myself to N4 has made me study much much harder than I would ever have otherwise and I’ve advanced quite a bit. Also I got a quick trip to Düsseldorf out of it where I could eat Asian food at a level and authenticity that’s impossible to get in Berlin.

Cultural

With everything else that was going on, I didn’t have anything significant happen here. No time, no energy, no relevance.

I don’t really know how other people manage to binge dozens of crappy Netflix shows. I can’t really imagine spending entire evenings watching television. Do people do this still?

There are lots of good shows still that I would like to watch (The Last of Us, The Bear, Succession, etc.) but there’s just no time.

Books

I only read 15 books this year with Galian, Genki and the sheaf theory book—none of which are listed below—sucking up most of my reading time.

Cold Enough for Snow was a nice book and it also happened to be the only piece of fiction I read this year. The rest of the books above are all highly situational and none of them are particularly interesting or made a lasting impact.

Video

I watched six movies this year. The only notable one was Heat which I first saw as a teenager in the City cinema in Amsterdam.

When it comes to television things look slightly better:

• The Sandman: We did not finish it but enjoyed the episodes that we watched.
• Spy x Family S1: Exactly the light-hearted fun anime that I needed to watch. Nothing serious here but a fun conceit well executed.
• Tour de France Unchained: An epic dramatization of the world’s biggest cycling event that is a must watch if you’re even slightly interested in the sport.
• The Witcher S3: Nothing of note happened in this season but it was still kinda fun to watch I guess.
• Attack of Titan S4P2: It was good to watch the ending of this epic series but after such a long wait it was kinda hard to pick up the relatively complex storyline.
• Death Note: An anime classic that I started which is well executed but tough as nails and not at all compelling.
• Jujutsu Kaisen S2: The long awaited Hidden Inventory and Shibuya Incident arcs turned into a treat to watch despite the continuously escalating power levels and its sprawling cast of characters and villains.

Games

During my recovery from surgery I started and finished Breath of the Wild. The irony of having had a climbing accident and making Link free-climb epic cliffs on Hyrule was not lost on me.

That was the year. Let’s see what the new one does.

It felt like a year where not that much happened (no travel!) but at the same time a steady stream of minor misfortune was showered upon me. In the grand scheme of things I can’t really complain but all in all it was definitely a mixed bag.

Corpore sano

#

Everything with my body was going well last year, until suddenly it wasn’t anymore. Adjusting to that has been painful.

Cycling

#

Cycling was one of the best things. This was the first season that I started out with the road bike and even though it was cut short, there were some great rides to be had.

Most notably I went on one gravel group ride with the local Gravel Club which was a lot of fun and I went for my first century with a couple of colleagues.

My weight loss journey™️

#

At the start of spring I felt I needed to lose weight and then figured out how to do it. I went down from over 85kg back to under 78kg over the course of six months.

I’m writing a piece summarizing how I figured out weight but in short:

• I eat because I’m bored.
• I get to a caloric deficit by doing endurance cycling.
• I try to fast after my last meal of the day until the next morning.

I’ve been very happy about this and wish I had figured it out earlier but a lot of this has been contingent on both me figuring out things about myself and the huge amount of nutrition and fitness knowledge available online.

Minor scrapes after ramming a car with my bike

#

I got myself into a bicycle accident slamming into a car on my way home from having my eyes checked.

A car turned right on Mehringdamm but then halted on the bike crossing because there were pedestrians crossing as well. I tried to swerve around but couldn’t and fell, rolled over my bike, hitting my head on the car and the ground. I got some scrapes and hematomas in my groin and on my temple. The one in my groin has dissolved, whereas the one on my temple can still be felt.

Every cyclists first thought in such a situation: the bike. My cockpit was twisted a bit and my chain was jammed behind the frame but otherwise it was fine. The chain broke a couple of weeks later—probably because of this.

The police wrote us up as being both at fault and I chose not to pursue the matter. In Germany, as a cyclist, you are pretty much always screwed so I’m counting my blessings and I paid the €170 fine to be done with this.

No more bouldering (and lots of other things)

#

Then the big one. The past year I finally got back into bouldering in a serious way and found my groove. I was getting to our local climbing gym more than once a week and improved to the point where I could climb V4 problems. I’ve been bouldering on and off since I’ve been in Berlin but this has been the best I’ve ever been.

Unfortunately, this didn’t last very long because at the end of August I was doing a very moderate traverse on the wall and lost my footing. Normally this wouldn’t be an issue but this time my right foot got stuck on the volume and twisted my knee on the way down. I heard a tearing noise while in the air.

A long story and a bunch of orthopedic visits later I find out that I have what is called an unhappy triad of injuries also known as a ‘blown knee’. It’s relatively atypical for climbing but checks out with the exact thing that happened to my knee.

The black tendon is my PCL. The grey cloud superimposed on it, is what remains of my Anterior Cruciate Ligament (voorste kruisband).

I’m scheduled to have my ACL reconstructed in February. Until then I’m not climbing or running anymore but doing some mild cycling. My knee does not bother me that much but it’s also not very happy if I stand or walk too long. The goal for the coming year is to have a stable pain-free knee.

I’ll be fine if I after this I can cycle and hike at a moderately high level. I’m not sure whether I’ll ever go back to climbing given the risk of injury. Watching bouldering videos on Tiktok at the moment makes my stomach turn.

Corona

#

Just as the end of the year approached we as a family finally caught COVID. Our LFTs were the first positive ones that I’ve seen this entire pandemic. That proved to me that 1. yes they do work 2. we didn’t have it before.

Despite going to the office daily and having had some close calls, it wasn’t me that brought it home.

Being stuck at home with the kids for 10 days waiting to test ourselves free was a trial of everybody’s sanity. Also because it’s relatively arbitrary and a bit of a voluntary act. People who don’t have themselves tested don’t face any restrictions. People who do get tested, get very few benefits out of it.

Mens sana

#

My mind has been doing better also because I had to reduce my physical activity. Instead of brutal physical exercise, I guess I’ll take on lots of mental exercise.

Voice lessons

#

At the start of the year I got some lessons in voice coaching in which was nice but I had trouble combining it with my schedule. What I learned, I did manage to put to good use.

Making strides

#

After trying every possible tracker out there, I picked Strides to remind me of the things that I should be doing regularly. It’s €5/month but it’s worth that just for getting me to do my push-ups regularly.

Not everything I’m tracking is sticking or even on track, but building habits takes time and active reflection. This app is the most minimal first step on that path.

日本語

#

While I was cramming HSK3 vocabulary in 2021, I realized I had no real motivation to learn Chinese. I probably never really had any to begin with. Following a whim I switched to Japanese. That has been going reasonably well and I can even recycle my knowledge of Chinese characters when learning kanji.

I finished the Human Japanese iPhone app and then spent the rest of the year learning all the vocabulary in it. Below you can see 4500 cards in Anki spread over a full year of studying.

Now it’s on to complete Human Japanese Intermediate and further material. Judging from a quick online test, it seems that what I’ve done so far brings me most of the way to JLPT N5 level. I may take that test in 2023 or go straight for N4.

I’m not sure when I’ll hit a wall but my main motivation is relatively steady: I want to make my next visit there the best it can be.

Maths

#

After a slump when it came to my professional reading I organized my PDFs and setup a flow to read papers. Then I tried to read a paper on uKanren and didn’t understand that. I followed the trail working myself through everything in The Reasoned Schemer to reintroduce myself to logic programming. That was very rough and I would not have understood it without the relevant bits in SICP and PAIP.

Then I stumbled upon the book “An Invitation to Applied Category Theory: Seven Sketches in Compositionaliy” and spent my evenings and weekends working through it, doing the exercises and watching the lectures at MIT. They said it would require some mathematical maturity and it turns out I had just enough of that.

I have no idea why this book stuck but I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. The focused time, clearing my brain and working on something very difficult without direct application. Watching the lectures—some nights at 0:30 with my eyes falling shut—I felt like I was back in a dusty university chalkboard room.

The material stretched my thinking and facility for abstraction which pretty much seems to be the point of Category Theory. It didn’t do a lot for my understanding of functional programming, but I hope it laid a reasonable foundation for later.

I’m finding practicing math is more fun without the pressure and trauma of your life depending on it like in university. I’m now reading up on some Abstract Algebra which I felt I was lacking. It’s making me realize that I don’t vibe well with math that’s about numbers (except for statistics, I always loved statistics). I prefer logic, computability, topology and the likes.

Reading some good things

#

The year has been pretty bad for reading as most years recently have been.

The notable books I read:

• Rust for Rustaceans by Jon Gjengset: A book for Rust library authors more than anybody else. Whatever I picked up I forgot pretty much immediately because I work on the application side of things. Still good to have read and I remain continuously amazed at how much Rust knowledge has to be picked up through osmosis.
• An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management by Will Larson: An excellent and beautiful book that’s a high level overview of Engineering Management.
• Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys by Joe Coulombe: An inspiring and fun read about the founder of Trader Joe. Weird to read this without ever having been in one of the stores.
• Executive Presence: The Missing Link Between Merit and Success by Sylvia Ann Hewlett: A thought provoking book about what’s necessary to be successful beyond doing the job very well.
• Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers by Kwame Anthony Appiah: Appiah’s poorly dated take on the multicultural world. I like the guy but it just doesn’t track. My position on this is that relativism needs to be overcome by normative internationalist cultures. One example of such a homogenous culture spread out all across the globe is Airspace, but I hope we can make better ones.
• The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson: The most important book that KSR has written so far. This is an essential inspiration for anybody interested in fixing the planet. Everything that KSR has been pursuing and hinting at in his previous books comes together here.
• Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software by Eric Evans: Good to have read this but a ridiculous slog that I wouldn’t recommend to anybody. Most of the things in here should be obvious for a senior practitioner.
• The Reasoned Schemer by Daniel P. Friedman: The aforementioned book about logic programming.
• Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie: A tour de force by Rushdie which does what it intends to do, but is just too slow and heavy for me. The main thing I took from this book is an appreciation for and an interest in India’s culture and history.
• An Invitation to Applied Category Theory: Seven Sketches in Compositionality by Brendan Fong: The book about category theory I wrote about above. I recommend it also for its spiral approach where each chapter starts easier than the last one finished, so that you have a chance of keeping up.
• Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel: Keeping with my theme of reading books whose authors had something bad happen to them I started Wolf Hall after Hilary Mantel passed away. It definitely is at least as good as everybody says it is. The topic of handling a whimsical man-child ruler is one that is acutely relevant in our current time. Advice on how to be a Cromwell is more useful than advice on how to be a Prince.

Picking up my studies

#

I reconsidered my position that I had completed my professional reading. For sure I read most of O’Reilly and all the relevant books in engineering and product management. That wasn’t particularly challenging beyond finding the time.

But there is a lot more stuff out there if you expand your horizon and don’t mind somewhat more academic books. With that in mind I went through my anti-library and assembled a new shelf on Goodreads with books that are hard and stretch what it means to be a professional: advanced studies.

I’ll be spending the next 5-10 years working through this eclectic collection of mathematical computer science, systems theory and management studies. I’m not sure yet where I’ll be able to apply this knowledge in my work/life but I can’t wait to find out.

Alii

#

All the other stuff has been fine.

Family

#

Things are going well with the kids. They are doing well at daycare, they’ve completed their basic swimming certification (Seepferdchen) and they’ll start school next year.

What’s most exciting is that they are getting to an age where we can consume media together. We watched both Frozen movies and they got a Nintendo Switch for Christmas. Pikmin 3 is a big hit.

Work

#

Work is very much a bullet train where we performed huge lifts during the past year while at the same time everything and everybody was rushing forward. Bootstrapping an entire engineering organization as part of a senior management team and building a multi-team platform organization is a lot of good fun, but it’s also a huge amount of work.

The focus after the building is execution and delivery which to me cements the idea that engineering is an operational discipline more than anything else.

Games

#

Some people know that I used to be into esports and MOBA games. Because of that I couldn’t resist playing a good one on my iPhone. I got into Wild Rift from the very beginning, played it heavily and quit last year. Wild Rift is executed perfectly, it’s streamlined and offers the right amount of depth and duration. When the games are good (at around Diamond), they are very good but the rank reset every season makes playing this too much of a grind.

Then we got the Switch and now my holiday evenings are mostly consumed by Hades. If it isn’t one poison, then it’s another one.

Watches

#

One of the most atypical interests I picked up last year has been watches. I’m wearing a wrist watch again after having picked up an Orient Kamasu diver at a bargain. Not having to take out my phone to see the time has been great.

Not sure when or if I’ll buy another watch.

Twitter

#

The demise of Twitter is one of the bigger stories of 2022 relevant to me because of the age and activity of my account. I was one of the first 10 twitter users in the Netherlands and it was a huge part of my online life. Time to move on.

The site may still be up and running but Twitter as a public space is over. Destroying something like that is a crime of a magnitude I hope we’ll appreciate and punish at some point in the future.

Thanks to some friends who set up an instance, I can in the meantime be found over at Mastodon: @alper@rls.social. It’s nice over there.

The days are long but the years are short.

One more year over and these are starting to look like a blur, so here’s what changed.

Work

#

I gave notice between Christmas and New Year 2020 and spent the first three months of the year in a weird in-between state mostly done with the old job, waiting for the new one to start, in between daycare closures and being sick.

Then the new job started and I fell into a blur of work that has continued for most of the rest of the year. It’s been a nice change but also very intense. Details are on LinkedIn.

Travel

#

I haven’t been anywhere in 2021 except to an island in Croatia last September with work which definitely was a highlight.

Will I travel again and why? I have no idea.

Learning

#

I finished Turkish. I now prefer it over German again especially for writing.

I gave up on Chinese and couldn’t motivate myself or figure out how to book the HSK2. I did learn a couple hundred characters which seem to mean the same thing as in Japanese.

I started learning Japanese which is a lot more enjoyable and for basic conversation seems a lot easier. There also has been some strengthening on the claim for a relationship between Turkish and Japanese so let’s see how it goes.

I should have started this way earlier and not listened to anybody who ever said something is difficult. What they mean is that something was difficult for them. Depending on their intelligence, many things may in fact be difficult for them. It shouldn’t matter to me or anybody else.

Kids

#

The daycare was closed at the start of the year until March or Easter, not sure anymore. Most of the rest of the year things were up and running.

We had a nasty burn wound on one kid that cut the summer break short and gave us several weeks of grief but in the end all turned out well.

Then at the end of the year we gave notice. We are leaving one very esteemed Kindergarten for another which I didn’t think would be possible with two kids in the middle of the year, but it is. We even had several more places willing to take our kids.

The kids are doing really well. After a brief bout of gymnastics which they enjoyed a lot, COVID made us switch to outdoor ice skating for now.

Sports

#

I finally killed my old fixie or to be more correct it nearly killed me. With it gone, I could finally shop for a real road bike.

Thanks to a ship blocking the Suez Canal and all the other supply chain difficulties in the world, there was a tremendous bike shortage most of the summer (who knows, maybe it’s still going on?) and I got any random bike I could get my hands on in the €1000 price range.

I also got most of the tools and kit that you would need for cycling. It’s the clichéed guy midlife hobby. The local Rapha store is more convenient and also cheaper than many of the cycling apparel you can buy dropshipped over Instagram.

I seem to have ridden 1231km on it and looking forward to doing many times that in the coming year. The details are on Strava.

I picked up bouldering again which when in a rhythm (every 4-5 days) I’m finding pretty enjoyable.

Health

#

I got boosted randomly on November 17th which was a lot earlier than I expected and before almost everybody I know. I am now AZ/Comirnaty/Comirnaty.

We survived another year. That’s it. That’s the year note.