This was 2020

2020 was a crappy year: Corona with all its deaths, Trump, lockdowns are just some of the things that simply went far too wrong during the last 12 months. But, there were also a lot of positive things to report for 2020 and I want to focus on them in this little retrospective.

Looking back

My first iOS app

In February I finally released something to the iOS AppStore: FosdemToGo, a little companion app for the FOSDEM conference that takes place every winter in Brussels! It was great fun writing on this during FOSDEM 2020 and while I didn’t spend any time improving it after the initial 0.1 release, I absolutely plan to do so this year (with a little bugfix hopefully making it through the review process by the time this post is live!).

There will probably be more blog posts about iOS in the future if I can finally find the time to get into unit testing with Swift and SwiftUI 😅

Certifications

As part of my educational leave I wanted to also get some certifications done. It took a bit longer but I eventually got the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer and Certified Azure Solution Architect certs. None of that changed my general opinions about tech certifications but I still had lots of fun especially with the Kubernetes one and learnt a lot that I wouldn’t have done otherwise.

Bullet Journaling vs. GTD

Since March I’ve moved away from GTD over to Bullet Journaling. At first it was only an experiment. After 9 months I’m still not completely convinced that Bullet Journaling will stay in my workflow over the long run. There might be a point within the near future where I will be using Omnifocus again for managing my tasks. What will stay, though, no matter what, is “journaling”. I love the way I can document the events in my life and the world and how it helps me keeping an overview over the long-term progress of projects.

For now, though, bullet journaling is the way I do things!

100DaysToOffload, blogging, IndieWeb

At the end of April, Kev started a challenge called “100DaysToOffload” which triggered me to finally pick up blogging in a serious way again. Over the course of the last 12 months I’ve managed to write 220 blog posts and 153 notes and also open the blog up to webmentions to become part of the IndieWeb.

The next step on the road here will be that I automatically post articles and notes to Mastodon (and perhaps Twitter). Following that I can work on using Mastodon as optional commenting system for the blog. More on that hopefully in the future.

Goals

Last year I set out to achieve a couple of goals. Let’s see how I did there:

  • 85kg by 1 July: I didn’t manage to get there. Instead it took me until December to finally fall below 86kg and then eventually even below 85kg!
  • Family tree software: Sadly, I haven’t found the time for that project. In fact I think I didn’t spend a single minute on it during the last 12 months 😞
  • Pair-programming, TDD, XP: Out of these I’ve now mostly incorporated TDD into my workflow. Whenever I want to code something I always think about testing strategies and in at least a large number of cases I started with tests 😀
  • Software architect role: I’ve now a new certification in this department and at least partially feel more at home in that new role.

All in all I still think that I did well here given the circumstances. Only the lack of progress with the family tree app is disappointing.

Looking ahead

And this is pretty much the only solid goal I want to set for 2021: There needs to be some progress regarding the family tree application. Surely, there will also be tons of progress on other fronts but this one project will get some special treatment!

Concluding I hope that 2021 will be a good year again! Happy new year, everyone!