2020 roundup

Another year is (almost) ready for the history books, and as has become my tradition, I’m writing my annual end-of-the-year retrospective. There’s no doubt that this has been a very challenging year. March saw me sent to the home office, and though I returned to the office in May, working from home has become far closer to the norm. This was beneficial when we were ordered back to the home office in mid-November.

As a service provider to agencies under the Norwegian ministry of health, we were particularly badly hit by the demands of speedy turnaround in the days of Corona. We’ve seen an increase in tickets and calls across the board, and our case load has increased markedly.

I sat exams in management and labor law in January and February, and received grades in both that I am very happy with – an A and a C, respectively. While I would have preferred a B on my labor law exam, the fact that I got a clear pass along with a foundation in labor law is enough for my needs.

In my capacity as union representative, I was responsible for negotiating the renewal of our collective agreement. Having never even participated in such negotiations previously, it is no understatement to say that I had a lot to learn before stepping into the negotiation room. All in all, I am very happy with what I was able to get; our collective agreement is better than ever, and trades convoluted language with a lot of irrelevancies for clearer language that improves the coverage of the agreement.

That’s not, of course, to say that I got all I wanted – far from it. I had to relent on some of my demands in order to get what I wanted on other fronts – that’s a key part of renegotiating such agreements, after all. Importantly, I learned a lot through the process, as well, and will hopefully be able to achieve more the next time I step into the negotiating room.

Despite occasionally finding it hard to motivate myself to sit down and write posts, I’ve been able to post once per week, every week for this year. To be honest, that feels like an achievement in and of itself. This has been a very different – and relatively rough – year, and keeping up with the blog has been a challenge which I’m happy to say that I’ve been able to meet.

The content this year has centered around opinion-pieces and reviews, with a fair amount of powershell-stuff added in for good measure. In addition, I’ve had a number of how-to– and tool-related posts. The vacillation between these and other topics are both a reflection on what I need to learn for work, and on what interests me outside of my daily obligations.

Since January, I’ve seen a steady increase in readership, averaging around 4’300 monthly visitors (up by two thousand from 2’300 in December of last year). Having that number of visitors is certainly welcome, although – as I’ve now repeated ad nauseam – I primarily write for an audience of one: myself.