This year hasn’t been an easy sailing for many, including me. So naturally writing this year in review isn’t going to be easy either. But that’s no reason to not do it at all. I still love this time of the year when I get to sit down and reflect on the past events.
So let’s rip the 2023 bandaid off…
Highlights
- Grew Hygraph design team to six designers
- Made $7,696 in revenue from Product Disrupt
- Launched AI Escapes – Travel postcards & wallpapers
- Privately released Work Abroad Guide
- Crossed 10K on Twitter [X]
- Spoke at five conferences & meetups
- Launched Radler & Gelato – Travel shorts
- Suffered from anxiety attacks due to burnout
- Had a few life-threatening travel incidents
- Lost my Grandpa
- Picked up a new coffee hobby
- Fashioned long hair
- Received a Permanent Residency to continue living in Germany
- Joined a cricket club and started playing again
- Traveled to 22 places in Asia, Europe & the USA
Work
Hygraph
The tech industry has been going through a significant economic downturn for the past couple of years, and most businesses have struggled. Though Hygraph stayed relatively strong. We didn’t have to do any mass layoffs because we’ve grown our team sustainably. But, of course, the growth slowed down while the industry corrected itself.
I continued in the design leadership role, growing the team to five designers and often working with external freelancers to help with excess workload.
This year, I also promoted two of our designers to a senior role. Helping them grow in their careers has been the highlight of my leadership journey so far. Seeing the fruits of your investment in a human is incredibly fulfilling.
I continued sharing the behind-the-scenes of design at Hygraph on my socials and also wrote this thread on X about my approach to building Hygraph’s first design system. I’ve linked all the resources that I used along the way. You will find it helpful if you’re getting started in design systems.
I also took some time to share our design principles & method publicly on our blog. You can take a look here.
I started this as a Notion document when we began to grow our design team. This was to keep our team’s design philosophy and method aligned as we scaled past your boy being the only designer on the team.
Product Disrupt
It’s no secret that 2023 was a challenging year for businesses that run on advertising revenue.
The newsletter couldn’t book sponsorships for a few issues, but I added another revenue stream in the talent network, which balanced out the total revenue.
Expenses remained the same – I run this side project frugally.
Disappointed with the subscriber growth – no shame in admitting that the numbers here have been stagnant. I want to change that this year.
2023 – Product Disrupt
- Revenue: $7,696.67 (-303.63)
- Expense: $204 (=)
- Total Subscribers: 4,992 (+187)
- Site Views: 8.71K (-12.29K)
Shameless plug: Want to receive new free resources to stay up-to-date with product design and build your own products? Then subscribe here to get them straight in your inbox every two weeks.
AI Escapes
If you haven’t been living under a rock, you would know we’re going through a revolution in Artificial Intelligence. ChatGPT by Open AI took AI mainstream, and as the eternal learner that I am, I started experimenting with it.
Doing is the only way I know to learn anything new. So, I combined my passion for travel and visualization by creating a series of postcards & wallpapers generated using Midjourney.
Sidenote: I wrote a piece on how AI will inevitably replace graphic design jobs that sparked some opinions.
AI Escapes is my new side project where I’ve reimagined my favorite places in the world with generative AI. These places are real, but the postcards are generated with a touch of imagination & fantasy.
It’s absolutely free to download and to use it however you want. If you’re feeling generous, the download link also provides a way to make a donation. So far, 87 people have downloaded these postcards and used them as their mobile wallpapers.
Just last month, I printed these postcards to giveaway to my friends & family with a brief story and a life lesson hand-written on the back. Seeing the reaction of my friends when I gift these postcards to them is priceless.
Work Abroad Guide
With my co-founder Beto, we did a private release of the Notion guide for our email list. The guide is about 40% complete, so we gave our early supporters a 40% discount. 6 people have purchased it so far. We plan to release it publicly sometime this year.
Since moving abroad is a journey and not just a one-time transaction, we also launched a private community to help our members along the way. There has been little activity there, but we hope it will pick up as the public release progresses.
If you’re keen to get your hands on the guide, drop me a message on X.
10K on Twitter [X]
I crossed the monumental 10K number on Twitter in Aug 2023. So much has changed on this platform over the years and, especially recently. But the conversations I get to have there and the connections I’ve made still remain special. Thank you for giving me your attention, I’m grateful for it.
Here’s to creating consistently 🥂
Speaking
As the in-person events & conferences made a comeback, I started speaking again. Video calls are cool, but they’re no replacement for the thrills that a stage with a real audience provides. I’d missed that.
I spoke at several local & international events, including a talk at the Google HQ in Berlin.
- How to Build a Career in Design with Side Projects – Berlin Product Designers Meetup at N26
- How to Become Hireworthy – UX Gym Summit in Berlin
- Breaking Down Design Silos – Tech Day by Project A at Google HQ in Berlin
- Building a Culture of Design – Boye Conference in Aarhus
- Building a Career in Design with Side Projects – 10X Conference
In addition to this, I also made a guest appearance on two podcasts:
- How to Level Up your Design Career – Readymag
- Key to Success as a UX Designer – UX Gym
I’d hoped all this speaking would get me a slot at Figma’s marquee event – Config. But unfortunately, my talk proposal was denied for the third time in a row. I cannot fault them though, they’ve got a tough job of screening from literally the whole design industry.
Figma Config will remain the final bonus to conquer in another year.
YouTube
I published 3 videos on my channel this year. And somehow, I didn’t find the time to post the several clips I already had prepared by my little sister.
But hey, I launched a brand new channel with my lovely wife and have already posted 20 videos there. More on this below in the Life section of this review…
I’m not setting any YT goals for myself this year, but I do have the urge to record some Consistent Creators episodes. If you would like me to make more videos, please hit the subscribe button. The numbers will definitely motivate me.
Life
Anxiety Attacks
I had a rough start to 2023 – I was greeted with two episodes of anxiety attacks within the same week. I never considered myself to be an anxious person. In fact, I never really truly understood anxiety because I never had it. So these attacks took me by surprise, and at that moment, I thought my world was ending.
The first happened at a restaurant where I was dining with my friends in Berlin. I felt a sudden weightlessness and couldn’t stand. I got scared and kept worrying about it on my way back home.
The second one was the worst. It happened a few hours before my flight to India when I was relaxing at home after we were done packing. I had a feeling that something terrible was going to happen, and I started shivering. Somehow, I managed to get on the flight and reach home in India. I can’t clearly remember how I got home – the journey was a blur.
Later, I got in touch with my doctor friend in India to diagnose my condition. He asked me to get the blood tests done. From the reports, we got to know that I had a heavy deficiency in vitamin D & B12. So he put me on medication to recover from this, but it didn’t explain my anxiety attacks. He also couldn’t pinpoint the reason as it had only developed recently.
From that point onwards, I started getting these minor anxiety episodes very frequently. It prompted me to read up on it, and I found out that my condition was called Relaxation Induced Anxiety (RIA). It’s when you get anxious in a state when you’re relaxing.
You relax when you’re tired or overworked. And you get anxious instead of relief. What a terrible dilemma, right?
As I started reflecting upon my trouble with anxiety, I realized that I was burned out by work for the past several months, and my ignorance might have surfaced in anxiety. If you don’t listen to your body, it has its way of telling you that you’re not okay.
It took me a while to come to terms with my condition, and during this time, I had my own weird ways of coping with it. I kept telling myself that it was only temporary and it would pass. To fight it, I told myself I’m a motherf*cking star boy and can handle this.
While my ways gave me temporary relief, they didn’t help me accept my anxiety for what it was. Whenever it showed up, it became a battle between my anxiety and my mental toughness.
This went on for several months until I finally accepted it. Being okay with being anxious brought me back to my true comfort. It’s been over a year, and I still get anxious occasionally. But now, I don’t treat it as an enemy. We’ve become friends now, and we have our internal chats when it visits me.
I’ll leave this here and will share what helped me in battling with anxiety in another post.
Travel Incidents
I’ve mostly had great experiences with travel throughout my life, but that changed in 2023 when I was met with a series of dangerous incidents.
It was my first time in Bali. I was staying with a coworker of mine in a villa in Seminyak. On just the second day, someone broke into our Airbnb at 2:30 noon in broad daylight. We got into a fistfight while the guy tried to escape. We managed to save our stuff, except for my coworker’s power bank.
We also confiscated some stuff from the thief while he tried to escape. He had climbed the main door with the wooden ladder and used the screwdrivers to open the room locks.
Next week, I moved out to explore Ubud. On the second night there, I was coming back to the hotel from the coworking space on a scooter. I put my phone on the holder to use it for navigation.
When I got into a dark & narrow street, two guys on a scooter rushed towards me and snatched the phone from the holder. My first instinct was to chase them, but I soon realized it was not a good idea to chase local thieves in a foreign land all alone on a dark night.
Luckily, that was my spare phone, and it wasn’t in its best condition. The annoying part, though, was the next few hours that I spent changing the passwords of my critical accounts and struggling to order replacement SIM cards from a foreign land.
Later that year, I visited San Francisco for Figma’s Config conference. Again, just on my second day in SF, I was met with a life-threatening incident.
I was sitting on a bench at a crowded Pier 39, and I saw a guy shooting 20+ rounds at the other guy in the moving car. In this crossfight, the gangsters injured two random civilians.
The most shocking part for me was the aftermath of this incident. The crowd was obviously disturbed, but the police discounted it as a regular event. Like they’re used to seeing such gun violence on an everyday basis in the US. God help America!
Overall, these incidents were rough and could’ve easily gone sideways. I’m thankful to the almighty that I’m alive to write another year in review.
Farewell Grandpa
Losing a loved one is never easy, especially when they’re your everything. I lost my Grandpa later that year to a sudden heart attack.
My mother didn’t survive my delivery – she died on the day I was born. From that day onwards, my Grandpa took the responsibility of raising me. He showered me with all the love in the world and never let me know the absence of a mother.
Losing him was like losing a part of me. Strangely enough, I knew this day was close as he got older. And I also had the realization that I’ll probably not be around him when this happens because I live seven seas apart and visit him once a year.
But I’m thankful to God for granting him a peaceful demise. He was healthy & happy in his old age. That was his reward for being the kind person he was. Farewell, Adha!
Radler & Gelato
Lately, I’ve gotten into making videos and want to improve. The only way I know to learn something is by actually doing it. So, together with my wife Pooja, I’m experimenting with making travel shorts. These are snappy reels that give you a feel for the place.
So far, we’ve created 20 travel shorts and recently started to pick some traction. We aren’t doing it for the numbers, but I can’t deny that they help me stay motivated. Give it a follow on Instagram or YouTube to see the world through our lens.
Why “Radler & Gelato” you may ask. Well, Pooja & I both love a refreshing German Radler & a smooth Italian Gelato. So we just named this project something that vibes with us. As simple as that 🙂
Coffee Snobbing
I picked up a new hobby this year – Coffee. Partly inspired by an internal Slack channel at Hygraph and partly due to the exposure to coffee culture in Europe.
Like everything I do, I’ve been iteratively learning about brewing good ground coffee at home. My setup is quite simple – AeroPress, hand grinder & milk frother. And, of course, I always try to find good quality beans.
This has also spiced up my travels as I’m constantly chasing good local beans and learning about various coffee-mixing techniques wherever I travel.
My family in India has the best reaction to my new coffee hobby. They watch me make coffee like I’m demoing a science experiment. The concept of ground coffee is so foreign and fascinating to them. That was also me until I moved to Berlin.
Long Hair
Like every little kid, I wished to grow my hair long. But I wasn’t allowed to in school. After school, I moved to Mumbai to go to college. That was my chance to grow my hair, but the hot & humid Mumbai weather made it extremely annoying. I could never get past a certain length because I started sweating a lot.
Having moved to Berlin, I wasn’t paying a frequent visit to the barber shop because it was relatively expensive, and cold weather ensured I didn’t sweat. So they just grew, and I was suddenly reminded of my childhood dream.
In 2023, I lived my dream of having long hair, and as soon as I traveled to India, I returned to my original hairdo. Long hair is great, but they’re not for me 🙂
Travel
2023 was another excellent year of travel. Dangerous but eventful.
- Hygraph design onsite in Marburg, Germany
- Family visit to India
- Vapi
- Mumbai
- Goa
- Remote work & vacation in South East Asia
- Bangkok, Thailand
- Bali, Indonesia
- Gili Islands, Indonesia
- Da Nang, Vietnam
- Hoi An, Vietnam
- Cat Ba Island, Vietnam
- Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
- Singapore
- Hamburg, Germany
- Figma Config & vacation in the USA
- San Francisco
- Lake Tahoe
- Las Vegas
- Yosemite National Park
- Remote work & road trip in Sicily, Italy
- Birthday in Krakow am See, Germany
- Speaking at Boye Conference in Aarhus, Denmark
- Christmas in Dresden & Leipzig, Germany
Wrapping Up
2023
Reflecting upon the year, the theme for 2023 emerged as Emotional. It’s so crazy that life took me through an emotional roller coaster right after feeling the most calm & content in the previous year.
Here’s a reminder to not take anything for granted. Enjoy while it lasts.
2024
I’ve got some thinking to do about where I’m currently in my life and where I want to go from here. While the reflection has to begin from within, the rapidly changing external events will also play a massive part in my transition journey.
Congrats! You made it till the end. Thanks for giving me your attention. I wish you a beautiful start to the new year ✦
In case you’re interested in reading my past year reviews, you can find them here – 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015.
Feel free to drop a link to your year-in-review in the comments below. I love reading them.
Darshan Gajara 