Year in Review

Reflecting on the past year and looking ahead to the 2023.

Goodbye, 2022! It’s the last day of the year and a time to reflect on the past year. I have mixed feelings as there were many ups and downs. Some are pretty personal, and I would like to keep them that way. There were times to cry, but also times to celebrate some personal and professional achievements.

TLDR;

• New apartment
• Job change
• Home office
• Learning new technologies
• Writing more

New apartment

We’ve finally moved to a bigger apartment this year. It’s been a significant quality-of-life upgrade on so many levels. I finally have a proper home office and am no longer working from the living room.

Job change

After almost four years at my previous job, it was time for a change. I’ve met many amazing people at Appsfactory and made some new friends. I want to thank Alex, Rolf, and Roman for giving me a chance - this was my first job in Germany🙏.

I joined billwerk, a subscription management company, in the summer. Unlike my previous job, I’m now working on a single product. I’m working 100% remotely, which has been one of the most significant changes in my professional working life.

Home office

As I work from the home office, I had to invest in some good equipment to make the meetings a more pleasant experience: Røde NT-USB and Elevato Low Profile microphone arm. I’m still looking for a good webcam. A suitable desk and comfortable chair are necessary - I could still do some upgrades here.

Learning new technologies

I’ve been mostly .NET full-stack developer, and this hasn’t changed much. I had a chance to work with MongoDB more and obtained my first certificate from Mongo University. Angular is new to me, so there are plenty of things to learn.

Writing more

Over 118k impressions on LinkedIn this year is a modest result for some but achievement for me. I haven’t been that active on LinkedIn previously, and that’s been a big mistake!

I moved my blog to a static site (powered by Astro.build and bunny.net) this year, but there is still plenty of room for improvement.

Plans ahead

Everyone makes New Year’s resolutions. Well, not everyone 🙂. I want to take this plan and create actionable goals out of it:

• Further improvements to the home office
• Learning
• be more consistent
• obtain more certificates (MongoDB, Azure, AWS)
• learn another programming language
• read more books
• Writing
• write more consistently
• come up with a system
• larger reach and more cross-posting

What have you achieved, and what are your plans for the upcoming year? Have you met your goals?