Most of the posts on this blog are about success. I write about my PRs, my wins, and my accomplishments. I write about the things that I’m proud of.

When I write about my failures, I write about setbacks. I write about how they are just temporary roadblocks that make my eventual success that much sweeter.

But sometimes failure is just failure.

At some point in our lives, as the story goes, the years start to blur together. As we get more settled in the rhythm of life, as our milestone events recede behind us, the distinction between any two years becomes less and less clear. And one day, we blink, and realize we’ve spent decades on cruise control.

I’m staving off this future as long as I can—and I did so successfully in 2022. Here’s some of my highlights of the year:

This year, Adidas entered the superspike game with their Prime SP2. Their athletes found immediate success with the new spike, most notably 2022 world champions Noah Lyles and Shaunae Miller-Uibo. I recently managed to get my hands on a pair of SP2s and put them to the test.

EF Core generates and stores a full snapshot of the database for every migration. For a large data model, like we have at Vesta (come join us!), every migration adds ~15k LOC. Over time, we end up with more migration than application code—in 10 months, we generated over 2 million(!) lines of migration code.

All these snapshots significantly impact compile time, and without configuration, makes interacting with the codebase more tedious and slower. These snapshots also aren’t useful—after enough time has passed, it becomes prohibitively difficult to actually revert N migrations back.

Ideally, we’d be able to “squash” old migrations into one, removing the old snapshots and migration logic while preserving the ability to spin up a fresh database. In the following, I’ll describe how we achieved this at Vesta.

Track has been the most constant part of my life these past few years—through job changes, moves, and a global pandemic, I’ve hit the track and competed. This year, my preseason started all the way back in September of last year, and I didn’t run my last race until the last day of July.

And I had a great season! I shaved two tenths off my wind-legal 100m (10.92->10.71) and more than a half second off my 200 (22.10->21.55)—these results, especially the 200, are well beyond my expectations for the year. I also managed to stay healthy during the competitive season (with one minor hamstring injury in October) for the first time in about a decade.