Despite living with a global pandemic (i.e. “the new normal”), the past year was a rather successful one for me.
I started 2021 with a new (= my current) job as a developer in the Salesforce universe and quickly found my bearings within my team. It’s an interesting position that’s pushed me into a somewhat unexpected full stack direction, meaning that I’ve been working with server side code, SQL databases, APIs and interfaces a lot more than I’d expected. That provides a lot of freedom when building customer specific solutions and learning/practising something new has also been quite satisfying on a personal level.
It wasn’t all fun and games though, especially when dealing with thousands, tens of thousands or even millions of records on a daily basis. Challenges like debugging legacy code, lack of test instances and monstrous relational databases occasionally lead me to the brink of exhaustion and/or frustration. I suppose that’s quite normal overall and I could always count on the support of my teammates in these few situations.
But enough of what I do at work now. Let’s have a look at what else I’ve managed to do last year. Here’s a somewhat chronological list:
- Coded and launched aitrack.work on a weekend in early February. It’s a simple task-based time tracker that I’m using for work every day.
- Migrated my personal website from Hugo to Eleventy in March.
- Switched watch3r.app from Vue CLI to Vite in early April, wrote about it and eventually got that article featured in Michael Thiessen’s Vue newsletter (which made me smile).
- Used Eleventy to build a custom browser start page in April.
- Built a serverless reporting service that writes into Google Sheets in May
- Gained a better understanding of architecting serverless back ends with Netlify functions and wrote about it in July
- Rewrote my personal recipes app from scratch using Vue 3 with TypeScript in August and September. Motivated by how shitty the old code was (one of my first SPAs) and supported by “TypeScript in 50 Lessons”. Looking at the code makes me happier now and I’m not going to avoid adding new features anymore.
- Took care of the front end/styling for Ethics in an App in November/December.
For what it’s worth, that’s a lot more than I thought I managed to get done.
Anyway, I suppose I should stop rambling and wrap this up. So, here’s some final thoughts:
Most significant growth
- Personal: moving from “no” to “maybe” more often and getting it done in half of the estimated time eventually
- Professional: contributing to a team and/or larger projects, i.e. writing much more code that can be used and understood by others
Most persistent challenges
- Personal: being active, i.e. leaving the notebook/tv/apartment (not kidding)
- Professional: context switching and multi-tasking
Best _ of 2021
- Game: Returnal
- Movie: Nobody
- Series: Squid Game