Now that is a catchy headline, in February. If you wonder how this blog was released in 2019 (hopefully as planned) but some article started in 2018 then don’t worry: the blog initial start was 2016! And I never got to really start it because there was no content (motivation => truth). Here we are in a new year, and I start at least a simple blog site that encourages me to learn getting better in English, as my wife tells me to do that because I am bad at it (lol). But first things first: let us do it the semantic way with headlines, paragraphs, lists and content.
Personal (life)
2018 would be my most stressful year, just after 2017, 2016, 2015… you see this could go on even more but let me start small and fix on 2018, ok?
By having a little family of three young persons it took a hell lot to get life on track in very aspect. Our son made his first steps at the beginning of the year and I was the first to see that change. It was awesome! The next day my wife saw it too, it was one of these happy moments in life, so cliché it hurts but makes your body warm with deep love for this life that we created and you want to drip every drop of blood to never stop him from advancing. At this time the sings for “sad Saturday” started to show their strong side, and it was later in the year where I had to come up to fix this together with my family. I think we got a hang of it now, no bad stuff happened but the stress was there at the time and we try to overcome the part with small steps into the future.
Around my sons first birthday my wife was very stressed and later ill. The good side: I had parental leave from my job. It was not easy, and painful for everyone. Sorry Neko, sorry little fox. I never want to repeat that kind of time again!
What emerged in us was a rage of feelings, we lost too much on the way and we lost the sight of what is happening with and for us in the future. Something stopped working, and that is what happened: we lost the sight for a “good” future.
Needed changes and opportunities
My biggest goal this year was already set in 2017: get a new job. Well, not the complete truth, I wanted to quit that job after 3 years experience even before starting there. Life made it easy for me and I just got lazy as a duck that is coming always to the same pound and place every year, like a Panda to its bamboos.
At the beginning of 2018 a friend of mine was “removed” (yeah, indirectly fired by own decision) from my workplace and our team was split up. No good situation because I smelled a lot of stuff that would come up until end of the year (and I was right about that). Around that time, I looked out for new opportunities next to my place. Then a head-hunter called me, and as much as I don’t like that kind of person (not personal), I got a job interview as a software engineer. Wow, fast and without any trouble to sell my soul to the devil. Thank you for your help! It is not always bad to get help (sometimes from the devil 😈).
At the beginning it was just a personal test to see what new opportunity that might become. I took the chance to learn from the interview. There came another company interview, but I declined as I wanted to see the first one ending, to not making any mistake to overload myself as I was already bloated.
The job interview was a little mixed up, because I thought I would be tested and stuff, but no, it was a really good experience and I liked the guys, even if I myself were a little shy. The interview went on and we finished it on good terms. After that I got a second meeting to check what I know about web development (funny think: this should have been the first one, tha is why “mixed up”) and with knowledge on many different parts for web development I got the job and moved happy to the new place. I got together into a big agency with a bright future for everyone. Cool!
Situation changed
After I quit my old job and moved on, I felt fresh and recharged, not cluttered in my old seat that it felt good and the stress on our family was lessen for the first weeks. But then “sad Saturday” gave its feedback. I started to write about it, for myself, for my family. Why did this happen? Answer: I lost a lot of money on the last job and parental leave, that it was hard for us to calculate our outgoings. As soon as I tried to check why we lost money it came like a storm: I did not calculate good enough! It was not only 2018 that was bad, same with 2017. We had a lot to rethink on our side from costs and life quality.
What we never wanted to do and still do not want to: change the quality of our life. This is something I never thought about as much as at 2018. My wife did not want to reduce food and clothes for us, just because quality takes you further in health and wealth, else you get dirtier by day from the inside and outside. It is true, I like my life, and I don’t want to get back to the old one I lived as a 20s beginner. What should we do? Cut costs, where? This was not easy and misleading for us. We had no old, damaged things that should be replaced or a need for new stuff. My actual notebook is from 2012, still kicking and working. Ok, I had to get an SSD but that’s it, and it’s cool. On this topic to not need to replace anything because of damage. I cleaned up the inner parts of our notebooks and this gave new life for both (less noise from the fans, and mine has a gamer graphic card!). No plan on change here.
What if something breaks? This might happen because things are getting old (hello kitchen!) and this might happen, still we were lucky, everything is the same old stuff as 2013. We calculated and planned on the “what if”. And my wife, best mathematician I personally met, found something simpler: we don’t need to do that all.
Out of sight
We lost our eyes on the things that we did together at the beginning and forgot to go back to that time: what is our situation now and what becomes of us in future. At this point we checked 2017/2018 again and put this next to today and the future. Boom! Because I was lazy to look earlier for a new job and the parental leave, we lost a lot of, not only money, my fault. Never underestimate this, a heavy blow for everyone. Then that was fixed by getting the new job. In future the money situation would get better over time. No Problems here. Another positive part of the new change was, that I could be earlier home and that took a lot of stress from both. No more 10 hours or more at work. More time for family. We lost that thought, even if it was there the whole time with the new job!
But there was a great gap that hurt us over the last two years, and we wanted to make it up together. There came my idea to start blogging on being a father and a developer. My wife took interest, because every idiot could do that (and they get payed well for that), she wanted to do that too, she is smart, it could work out better than me.
I checked on my last experience by creating something from nothing and how long it took to create a web site: one year for a little complex site. WTF? Yes, it took me so long and it was something personal. One year was too much. We decided to make it simple at the beginning and expand it step by step. We did not start 2018 with it but she planned her content and she might develop her site by herself. Great learning motivation! I was still at my personal site and scratched content together. And this was fine, and no work was done a lot of times on the development of the page. Well, I was lazy or lost the sight what to do and what I really wanted.
Personally ended
2018 ended in a strong feeling towards the future that we forgot. We took it easy over to 2019 with a new sight on the important parts for ourselves, and not for anybody else. We did not want to lose any more quality for us and that is where our journey really started. Personally, it was a hell of a year. There was nothing that could put a pavement on these wounds that we created and gave to each other. With open wounds we opened our eyes once again and looked that we have us and this is all we need, fug anyone else.
(New) Career
Just like I mentioned earlier, I lost a friend at work, problems would appear, and fixing them would become my job that I never was meant for. I quit and changed to a new workspace. From that time it was learning things in a big agency and it is as cool as brushing one’s teeth. But back to what happened to this road.
I started in 2018 to learn more about JavaScript. As before I did a lot of work based on HTML, PHP and mainly CSS, because this was the best stuff ever, and I felt comfortable. But then it got me, as I tried new things like Web Extensions for Firefox. Managing web applications with JavaScript felt easier each time I worked with it. I decided to learned the basics and deepen the knowledge what would benefit me later at a new job. Learning that was quite interesting, I had a lot of time next to the daily business part of the day. My workplace has not given me any workshops to expand my career, that is why I did it myself. I am self-taught (thanks internet).
I created little applications, made tests on performance in the smallest and darkest parts of JavaScript, and never went over to the big screen, that the internet offers. As soon as I got to a point where I felt no motivation I changed to other stuff, learned new things, switched back and switched back again, and again, and again … many times that I stopped at some point, because it was good enough for the application and my mental health. At the end it is good enough.
Advanced learning time
After the job interview for my new workspace I started learning ReactJS as a requirement and it was cool: everything I did before by VanillaJS it worked here out of the box. But don’t get me wrong: I still prefer my vanilla code over some framework/library because I like the control and learning curve. ReactJS was required for the future, I learned the basics and had a good understanding of it that helped for the beginning. Then things changed at the new job as I got into it.
I am flexible if it gets to code and I learn like: I know the basics; I can use it somewhere else as it is similar. Then I had to start on Angular (not AngularJS, thank you!) and learned that this was a new monster to tame. It was fascinating and motivating to create content with it. I still want to learn more on it! I loved it and it was refreshing to get into it. My first real “wow” in years (career life). Everything I expected to structure was there how I wanted to do it, and even better: everybody had to do it like that. I went to learn more from it, then got projects and moved on.
My title right now is “software engineer”, my job is more on the web development scripting part and not templating. I still do both (and can do even more from my experience earlier) but concentrate in this field more in the future, because that is what I really like: do the awesome stuff nobody directly sees. I still must learn and work on ReactJS, Angular, and maybe VueJS in future for a long time, and I hope to get better every day. I miss the time with PHP at work, but it is not like it goes away, because this blog is running right now on that. If that changes, then most likely to static HTML pages (from static generators). But maybe some new shit comes up and we can do even more complicated stuff online than before. This is a great time for web developers.
(Personal) Blogging
From all his personal stuff over the little new career time spend in this year I looked at another part that I wanted to do and that is: Blogging and get more into social media. I set up my blog 2016, did nothing until 2018, then got more into it. Or not.
On the side of everything that happened I planned my blog over the year (too long) and as I found some time to think about it I wanted to do all the new things that Firefox Nightly and other future internet browser support (CSS Grid!). I went over some design and structure, lost time and tried to check more on the content of my page. What else there could be uploaded? Ideas overflow me and then I saw: I got some ideas, and no content at all, no plan what exactly to write on it. At the beginning there was some structure and some parts of the site should have some experimental stuff too. How would that work out and would that be interesting to set in and would that help me out somewhere? Because this was a first for me, then for somebody who wants to read this content.
Bookmark module
At that point I decided to create a half personal, half public bookmark module, and this must be done after the blog runs. I had at the beginning of 2018 over 7500 bookmarks in my Firefox, and the sync broke on my tablet and mobile device. Why? because Firefox only works with 5000 entries. My Bookmarks were way over it, history took over 30.000, and I always liked to collect information. But this had to stop, and I removed a lot of bookmarks until the end of the year, step by step, because I had the time (thank you automatization at work!). As I got near my goal to get ~1000 bookmarks that I really needed I got an Idea: why not create a bookmark system on my blog and set interesting bookmarks into it (just like any other blogger site). This would be fun, because I could do a dynamic job by creating lists automatically as they get created, removed, modified, … you get the picture? It went over my head to make it overcomplex, and it is still in development right now as I have a little less time next to family and work. It feel like it must be done.
Start it already
On the thought that my blog never get the light that it deserves. I cancelled all other ideas and went on with the bookmark module, writing simple content as well. Now the content is released with a light design. After that it gets more “complex” (whatever that means) and I set in the bookmark module, planned are articles with lists from the bookmarks (“best frameworks/libraries/snippets/jokes/… of the hour/day/week/month/year/…”).
Until this blog runs, I take my time and create a nice to read flow. Most likely I hide my personal stuff. I can do whatever I want here 😁
Social (media) life
I declare the state of my social (media) life as “crap” with nobody seeing it. I was never into Facebook or Google+ (♰2019). On my plan to get more range on the social life on the internet I create a twitter account and investigated people doing the same as me, just fancier and shinier. Then I found David Walsh who had struggled with his family too, he still finds his part in social life and career (at Mozilla). My life moved on to get a little more interesting by doing stuff on the web and don’t feel shy about it. The worse thing could happen is to not talk to people, because you get frightened by something. Of course, I still don’t like the idea to get tracked or castrated by a company’s opinion, that is why I prefer my blog on shouting out my thoughts.
Next to get into twitter and posting nothing but first learn from everybody there I created an account at reddit. Well, reddit is such a place as being in time but never move on. Yes, there is newer content and answers and stuff like that, it feels like Google, that shows old solutions for problems that are better solved the modern way. Well, I will not critic it too much, there are a lot of guys that can help you there, use your tools wise and build your life around these parts.
Should I create an Instagram account? I don’t like that idea. Flickr just shoot off as to limit their plan for users. What else could there be? Post it on the blog might not be a good idea, too, because the content is not completely personal. I must to differentiate personal pictures from this content as much as possible. No gallery planned now. Next point.
Pictures that I create might be useful, and others come to other platforms but no plan on that (maybe in the future, maybe not). Don’t expect here anything and you will not be disappointed.
Twitter is my target, and I try to start small, like everybody, just to not overheat. I don’t need a plan to go with it, only one if I need to stop doing it. After getting some people to talk I move on in my career faster than ever and get to social world domination! A day later some cat wins my audience over because it is cute (or sad). With that said, no news on this part, getting more active over this year and try to say something. Thanks for reading. Wait, there is still more.
Finally (no) new year resolution for 2019
My blog makes a memory for myself as I move on in life with my family and career. I expect to visit this place a lot over the years and get motivated and change/charge myself for a better person in the future that the next/new me can respect the old one and understand how everything was (not easy but it got better by time). That was the idea at the end of 2018. Let us move on to 2019.
PS: I mentioned “lists” at the beginning, and here they are.
Respectfully mentioned:
- Google+ (♰2019)
- Facebook (never missed you from social point)
- “old companies I worked for until 2019” (never missed you)