Year in Review — 2020

2020 was a weird year for us all, but here's everything that I was able to do this year anyway:

At the beginning of 2020, I set out to redo my personal website. I was fairly impressed with how I’d built it (over-engineered and such), and also with how my blog post — which was a big motivation for revamping my website in the first place — had started to take shape. After months of work (and procrastination), I published my blog post in late November.

I crossposted it to dev.to and Hashnode, and posted it on Reddit as well. It also got picked up by React Status and the Stack Overflow newsletter!

I'd planned quite a bit for its release, but that still didn't prepare me for the sheer number of people who read my blog post — between all three platforms that I posted on, over 15 thousand checked out the post!

Here's what I wanna say to you — if you've got that one article that you've been sitting on for weeks/months, get it out there! You'd be surprised at how many people find it intriguing :)

There's tons of great content on Twitter if you're following the right people — I realised that in a year without much physical interaction with people, Twitter is a great outlet for thinking out loud; I got loads of feedback and motivation from people. Heck, I even got a job interview just because I was following someone who posted about it! The highlight of it all was getting followed by @Netlify and @cassidoo!

Late last year I started working at Remote, a company that is everything I'd ever dreamed of. It really does "walk the talk" of working remote and async!

We also have a public handbook that I recommend checking out! (Our number one value is kindness 🙂)

Working from home (for so long!) was a first for a lot of us, but in addition, I also:

• got a chance to speak at a conf for the first time (which got postponed to March '21 😭)
• got to play in VR (thanks @Remote!) It is one thing to read up and/or watch LTT videos about it, but nothing prepares you for the moment when you get to experience it firsthand

• took part in Advent of Code, albeit I could only keep up for nine days; You can find my solutions here

• Got more into mechanical keyboards

• started doing the New York Times Mini Crossword almost regularly

• treated myself for 2020 with the Sony WH-1000XM4

• released Karma: a custom theme for VSCode, and I'm so so proud that it was good enough for 2500+ people to install it!

I'm not great at keeping resolutions, but I came up with a list of things that I hope to do in 2021:

• Become better at fullstack develop and build an app, no matter the size
• Learn in public
• Help more people learn how to code (and get better myself)
• Be more consistent with posts on my blog and my newsletter
• Hopefully get to speak at offline events and also conquer my stage fright (or whatever's left of it)
• Get better at CSGO (reach out to me if you wanna play along with me!)
• ~~Improve my Remote work setup (should have some updates soon!)~~ I received my setup! You can also check out my /uses page!