Better late than never, right?

I'm really proud of myself that I've managed to write this article before the January ends.

I was very busy with building my new website and the tooling around it that enables me to manage all of the contents here - last week I thought that I won't be able to even release the website itself before the start of February!

Work-life balance (most of the time)

2018 was a steady year. During that period of time I was creating an amazing software with the folks from QContact team.

I really enjoy working there - we work in a very flexible yet efficient way that enables us to keep work-life balance: for example we can take a break during the day if something urgent happens and then come back later to continue job - which is really comfortable if you are a parent like me.

Of course it doesn't mean that working there is easy peasy - from time to time I still receive some tasks that first needs to give me couple hours of headaches before I find proper solution for it ;)

Freelance (?) & the future

Am I still freelancing? Yes and no. In the end of the 2018 I've started building my small side-project (tools/pipeline to create websites like this one) and I've paused any additional commercial activity (so except working at QContact).

Besides that I have also in head an idea for a space-adventure game and web comic - but I scheduled work on it later, after first project will be in a state that will satisfy me.

Personal growth stats

During the 2018, I've made 138 open-source contributions and 2203 private ones.

I've gained 232 points on StackOveflow (which makes 2346 in total) which is a bit funny since I've switched to mostly passive state/(in)activity there and barely ask about anything (Vue.js documentation has all that I need to make things work most of the time ;))

Social beast… not

To be honest I was not so active on my social media accounts during the year, which probably is the main cause of its stats:

• twitter: (@lukaszkups): +52 new followers (71 in total)

• instagram (@lukasz_kups): +30 new followers (77 in total)

Again - I'm the only one responsible for this situation - I care more about my code than social media :)

Lessons learned

In the 2018 I've learned A LOT. WebRTC / SIP, unit testing (finally!), some Vue.js dark magic tricks, messing around with really custom stuff for Webpack, Dockers etc. I even learned couple of really nice things using only pure Node & JavaScript.

Summary of the summary

Summing it up: most of the things went pretty alright last year, so I can't say any bad words about it - I hope this year will be just as exciting as the previous one :)

Wish you all the best in the 2019 & Happy Coding!

-- ł.