Cover image by Nazar Sharafutdinov.

2020 was a challenging year for most people out there. Staying at home the whole time with no way to get some relief from the existential dread certainly took a toll on most peoples well being.

I know a few people who had Corona; some even died of it. But even for the non-infected, it wasn't an easy time. Friends of mine broke up their decade long relationship; one with mental illness even killed themselves.

2020 was undoubtedly a bad year for humanity as a whole, and I hope you're all doing good. Things will hopefully change for the better in 2021.

But what did I do?

Privat

I'd call myself an ambivert person. I'm good with people but like to flake from time to time because I value my time alone more somehow. I think it took until October before I started missing parties and concerts, and even now, their absence doesn't stress me.

I'm living polyamory with multiple partners, and I think that helped much to stay sane. I visited three people I love regularly, and most months, these were the only people I met.

In terms of relationships, 2020 was especially interesting because I started one of my relationships at the end of 2019. So the lion's share of this relationship was during the pandemic. This is quite funny, because usually I tend to go out often with my new partners at the beginning of the relationship, and now we were forced to sit at home with each other right from the start. I liked it!

Business

I started working from home in 2014 after a crunch at a company that didn't lead to anything, so my way of working wasn't affected by the pandemic.

In 2017 I started blogging as a new Year resolution, and I found it pretty fun. Two years later, a book deal and a paid blogging gig came from it. Moesif approached me and wanted me to write about APIs for them, which was a turning point in my life—getting paid to write blog posts how awesome is that?

In 2020 I also taught frontend development at a design university for three months, but that was mostly much work and not much money, haha.

The pandemic forced many things to go online, and many companies started to invest more in online content. This worked out great for me, so by the end of 2020, I made as much money with blogging as I drove with software consulting when I started my self-employment.

In June, I started fullstack frontend, a blogging project where I teach people about using their frontend skills to do fullstack work born out of my work with serverless technology. I don't think I reached product-market-fit with it yet, but at least it keeps me motivated to learn more about new tech in my free time.

I also did many online courses about technical writing, Kubernetes, and startup founding and learned many new things in general.

I'd say overall, 2020 was a pretty good year for me personally and career-wise.

What's planned for 2021?

I am writing more! With Dashbird, I got a new client that operates in the serverless ecosystem, very interesting for me!

Maybe I'll even write my master thesis. (I say that for five years now)

I had the impression my articles are too simplistic in terms of examples. So I'm thinking about building production-ready systems to have something more substantial to write about for the fullstack frontend.

I stopped drinking alcohol, and the pandemic didn't lead to weight gain; I even lost 2kg, so 2020 was pretty good for my health, but I want to train more in 2021. I'm not getting any younger, haha.

I also improved my home-studio in the basement, so I hopefully will make more music in 2021.

How did you come out of 2020?