Family

In Switzerland, we were quite fortunate that we never had a hard lockdown. We had a couple of weeks where the schools had to close and we were told to stay home as much as possible. But since our kids are not yet in school and we have a big garden it did not affect us too much.
Of course, we had to make some arrangements at various points. But all in all it was not a bad year.

Work

In September 2019 I started freelancing for Valtech where I was involved with a team from DXC and worked on the e-banking client portal for a swiss bank. A quite large React/Redux application.

It was originally planned for six months and after that we were able to extend the cooperation for another 11 months. Given the fact that with corona we were facing a quite uncertain economic situation it was a relieve to know that even if our other clients at Say Hello had to cut budgets we would make it through the "crisis". I wrote that in quotes because luckily for us in the end, we had hardly any losses. But we did not know that at the time.

So four days a week I was working for valtech, the fifth I was still helping out at Say Hello.

Also when DXC changed to home office, it didn't have a negative effect on me since I am used to work from various places.

Speaking

As you all know, most of the conferences in 2020 were cancelled or moved to an online event. But I was still able to have some talks at online meetups and conferences this year. Some highlights this year:

Writing

In spring I finished some side-projects and I was looking for a way to record some of my learnings. And since most conferences and meetups were cancelled, I started with a dev.to account:

I also contacted CSS-tricks and got the chance to write an article about the notification trigger API. It was crazy to contribute to this platform, that helped me so much through my self-taught career in web development!

Coming to the end of the year I created a project called PWAdvent, an advent calendar for the PWA community. A lot of the articles were written by various developers from the PWA community. But I did my part as well:

Podcasting

Also in 2020, I had my first appearances in podcasts. And I was quite stoked that my very first podcast has been with the programmier.bar. A podcast I am listening to myself whenever they publish something new.

After that, Peter Suhm started his "billable hours" series, a podcast for WordPress agencies. There I had a chat with him about Progressive Web Apps and WordPress.

Side-projects

In 2020 I had a lot of ideas. But only a few of them have seen the light of day:

YTAudio

YTAudio

In the beginning of 2020, I've stumbled upon a Twitter-thread where Aleksej and Jonny were talking about a web app that would allow you to listen to the audio stream of a YouTube video in the background.

Long story short, I built it😊.

Unfortunately due problems with the library I used to get the audio file from Youtube it does not work anymore. But it was still great to learn a bunch of stuff.

Eurorelief

Eurorelief

In April 2020, Tim Schoch and his family travelled to Lesbos (GR) to volunteer at the refugee camp in Moria.

Through his eyes as a UX designer, he quickly saw a lot of places, where a digital solution could improve the situation of the almost 20'000 refugees waiting for their asylum request to be processed (note that the camp was built for max 3000 refugees)

Together with Eurorelief (the organization behind the camp), me and a couple of friends created a notification system that could have improved the daily lives of the refugees a lot. After a huge fire destroyed the camp, Eurorelief had to focus on other problems so our app has not yet launched.

Investment Simulator

Investment Simulator

At this years YBHackathon we have been assigned the challenge of developing a simple approach to investing and saving.

The subject itself was not as exciting as we hoped. But we found a quite nice solution: we created a game where users invest money and manage their portfolio based on events.

PWAdvent

PWAdvent

In October I was thinking about an advent calendar for the tech-/ web dev community. And since PWA is by far the most exciting subject I based it around those features.

Also instead of me writing summaries of features I barely know I reached out to other dev in the PWA community. It was all a huge success. 12 authors wrote about their favourite subjects and until now we have more the 65'000 article views! I never would have dreamed about such numbers when I was working on the idea.

[md.edit]

[md.edit]

As part of PWAdvent I wanted to know more about the File System Access API and the File Handling API. So I created a Progressive Web App where the user can create, open, edit and save markdown files.

It's not only a pretty useful tool I use myself quite often, it also opened up a whole new world of web development. Right now I have quite a lot of new projects in mind where I want to use web technologies to create desktop applications that can improve productivity. But that’s content for next years review😉

Besides that, I was able to invest some time into Progressive WordPress. The next release will be huge😍.

An outlook to 2021

After all, 2020 was quite successful but also quite exhausting. Working full time, having all my side-projects, my family and then trying to also find time for some skiing, skating and windsurfing wasn't easy.

That's why 2021 will be a lot different. Last spring we bought a caravan and from April 2021 on we will travel with it through Europe. We are super excited for this adventure and since we will mostly live from savings I will also be able to invest more in projects, talks and the community around PWA.