Year in review 2018

Sitting in our own couch, in our own house, kids safely asleep upstairs,… The road here was brutal, but the result is extraordinary.

The past year was (hopefully) the busiest year of my entire life. In the midst of raising two amazing kids, a challenging full-time job and being an active GDE, we built our dream house!

Looking back I honestly don’t know how we managed to pull all of this off… Choosing everything for the house, selecting and planning all contractors and even doing some (a lot more than anticipated) work myself… Anyways, I won’t bother you with the details, but if not for my wife and kids I would have broken down completely. The goal justifies the means.

Also at work, it was a non-trivial and very demanding year. I used to pride myself for being great at keeping a work-life balance, but… being a responsible for a team of people can really be quite intense.

Our team had quite some challenges thrown at us, and we really made the best of it: sometimes massively successful, but we also struggled… All in all, we did get a tight grip on our regression, laid the groundwork to improve our architecture and migrated to continuous deployment. (talk coming 2019 ;) )

In 2018, I/we mostly invested in our family’s future and:

• Built and moved into our dream house
• Helped our daughter go to school and taught our son how to walk
• Spoke at 4 big conferences and 1 meetup.
• Wrote 9 blog posts, not making my goal of 1 per month
• Almost double my Twitter followers to more than 3620
• Got 6 times featured in Android weekly and several times in Kotlin weekly
• Exclusively used Kotlin for every blog post and slide deck
• Helped Pluralsight built a Kotlin: App Fundamentals assessment

Looking forward to next year, I’m planning on living more! I’ve bought quite a few Lego’s I’d like to build, want to bring my kids to school by bike, spend more quality time with my wife and just professionally waste time on occasion. :)

I’m going to try and increase my community efforts back to 2017 level and maybe experiment with some new formats, such as my last blog post.

As always you can reach me on Mastodon, or leave a comment below!