As a diary piece, I like to post a final blog post for the year as a reminder of what I've done. Yes, entirely self serving, but, so is this blog 😉
Also as a reminder to future-Rem, 2016 was pretty bad for the world. We lost some amazing creative and inspirational talents including Prince, Alan Rickman, David Bowie, Anton Yelchin and Carrie Fisher 😢. Politically it was a shitfest too, the UK voted for Brexit (at time of writing is still being fought) and of course Trump was voted in this year to become the most powerful man in the world and other world atrocities, most recently Aleppo. The world is continuing to scare me.
Zooming in though, this post isn't intended as all that's wrong in the world, but just a gentle reminder to myself of a 2016 version of what happened to me.
Professional
I've continued to run Left Logic as a small web development agency comprising of just myself (dev & training) and Julie (events & logistics). The last 12 months work included:
- Snyk – I worked with Snyk from July 2015 to the end of August 2016. I spent a year in excellent company as I watched Guy Podjarny grow his startup idea to a successful and internationally recognised expert security product. If you have the chance to work with his team, definitely do it.
- ffconf – "the one where we did two days": very difficult in the months leading to the event, but hugely rewarding from personal point of view. I'm 70% sure we'll repeat this format again for 2017.
- Snapbird – I have a fairly decent number of side projects that just float around on the web, but very-very few of them are monetised. Mid-November 2016, I decided to experiment with Snapbird and make it a one-off payment. Aside from Christmas day, Snapbird has made money every single day once going live. It's not very much money at all, but it's really rewarding seeing the sale come through each day!
- Speaking – as with 2015, I had reduced my speaking down even more, only giving three talks, but managing to write two new talks for them 😕. Although, 2017 is already seeing me line up more talks, I'm hoping to re-use the content as it can be an expensive process to write a talk.
- Working the Command Line eBook – my ebook was published under A Book Apart as a brief 81 pager as an introduction for new developers, designers and anyone wary of the command line. Only took 18 months to get out there!
- Progressive Web Apps – built a few non-commercial PWAs, including a beta version for JS Bin (along with adding full mobile support). Get in touch if this is something I can help your business with.
Personal
My work is personal too, but I think this section is probably related to everything that isn't code!
- 10 years of this blog – my blog turned 10 on 1-September 2016, so I marked it with a little review of things that happened to my blog, like best bits and design changes (and introduced the attic).
- 24 posts – I had a large collection of drafts in my blog, and in October someone on twitter suggested I do an advent blog series, so I did. I published 24 blog posts (25 in December including this one) and over 23,000 words.
- Injury…again – I managed to make a small tear in my biceps brachii (basically opposite my elbow…what I like to call my e-bow), which is still in pain after 7 weeks after the injury. It was due to tight muscles - which I'm terrible for - and instead of my muscle stretching when I did a deadlift (yes…again), it tore 😞. I'm seeing an osteopath and I'm making progress, but it's slow. I just got to be patient.
- 100kg – on a related note, I managed my first 100kg bench press 💪. I weigh about 78kg so I was pretty happy (my max deadlift is 170kg, and 130kg squat). 100 is a nice round number 😄
- Reading – yes, good old fashion reading. I'm terribly slow at it (it once took me 6 months to read Frankenstein on my commute back in the early 2000s). In the last month though, I've read a few books (also quite slowly): Death of a Salesman, Reasons to Stay Alive (non fiction), A Body Called Christmas and Dark Matter (a wonderful recommendation from web folk). Not a huge deal, but a big deal to me!
Up next: 2017
In the new year, I'm trying to review how I run my business and plan on releasing a few of my own products, including a devtools online training video series and another to accompany my Command Line book (you can subscribe for updates as it's my plan to post there first).
I've also set a new rule for myself and new domain registrations (since they happen so frequently!): the domain must have paid for itself if I'm going to renew it (so hopefully this helps me weed out some of the old domains).
With that rule in mind, I'm hoping to release three new products in 2017: cron.jobs, taxdo.eu and an email reporting service - the last two based around Stripe payments (and reporting).
At the end of each day though, for me, it's all about my family. It's sometimes hard to remember that when I'm working on some clever little problem, or tinkering with something, but when I do look up and see, it's something I'm so thankful I have them.
