Better earlier than later, right?

I'm really proud of myself that I've managed to write this article before the end of actual year 2019! It's a real success, you'll realize soon why - but lets go with the yearly summary schedule first:

Work-life sinusoidal balance

Regarding workplaces it was again a steady year. I'm working now for almost 2 years as a part of QContact dev team.

2019 delivered me new challenges, especially in the middle of the year. Just before and after my summer break I've jumped right into crunch-alike work frenzy which led me to total exhaustion and mental fatigue. Adding tons of visits to doctor with kiddos in the middle of the days (fortunately I can schedule most of my working hours so I didn't have to take a full days off) makes an ideal recipe for disaster.

Luckily, just couple days ago I've started working in more efficient environment (starting much earlier, like 7AM and keeping strict track of working for 8 hours max per day) which slowly helps me recover. 👍

The future

Nothing fancy here - at the moment I focus on my own health & spending more time with kiddos - fortunately Christmas break is coming soon! 🎄🎅😁

Also, thanks to new workflow I have a little bit more time for my own experiments and side projects - already managed to redesign my website, started learning Godot engine and took a look on Quasar framework (which I probably will use to create desktop app for my static site generator, Writteli).

I've planned to share more insights during the process (both in learning Godot and developing Writteli for desktop) so maybe this website will be more alive 🧟 :)

Personal growth stats

Since 1st January till 13th December I've made 329 contributions (open source + private commits - not counting ones that I've made at my full time job) - but this stats might vary a little bit until the end of the year :)

Despite the fact I'm not very active on StackOverflow since last year, I've gained 1623 points, which makes me having them 3969 in total. 💪

This website has been seen by ~18k unique visitors in total.

Social media absence

This year I was even more absent at my social media - regarding twitter I think it's related to that new newsfeed design - it totally broke the joy of browsing twitter in my opinion.

• twitter: (@lukaszkups): +16 new followers (87 in total)

• instagram (@lukasz_kups): +2 (🤣) new followers (79 in total)

Lessons learned

Thanks to many issues handled at QContact I've managed to learn even more about Vue.js inside-outs than ever. In my spare time I've recently started learning GDScript (Python-like language used to make games in Godot engine).

Entertainment

This is a new section - I would like to share some stats about leisure time 😎

Books:

Best book read in 2019: Blood, Sweat, and Pixels (The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made) by Jason Schreier - oh boy, I wish there will be more books like this! It was so joyful read about the background of creating game hits (not only AAA titles). What really surprised me was the chaotic workflow that often accompanied the whole process of developing games (I thought that at least these big companies have very strict and planned approach of making them but I was wrong).

Movies:

Best movie in 2019: in the matter of pure joy/entertainment I would say Avengers: Endgame - a great summary of the whole Marvel world story (even though imho Infinity War still holds the title of the best Marvel movie). If I would go with the most interesting movie though, I would say HBO's Chernobyl miniseries. And of course Sillicon Valley series from HBO as a best comedy one.

I still haven't seen yet many movies that has been released this year (Joker, Ad Astra, Parasite etc.) so I think it might be not the best guide about 2019 productions 😉

Games:

I've switched my gaming totally to PlayStation 4 platform (despite having tons of titles bought via Humble Bundle and never played it yet). I think I'm getting really old as I've become a causal player, relaxing with Gran Turismo Sport races, running on Mirror's Edge: Catalyst or driving aimlessly at Grand Theft Auto 5. But the best game I had pleasure to play this year was Horizon: Zero Dawn.

Mecha dinosaurs in post apocalyptic world? What took you so long to finally create such an awesome title?! 🎮

I've also completed (nth time again) Hyper Light Drifter which is the best game of all time for me since it was released.

Summary of the summary

I really don't know how this year has went by so fast - it felt like it was way shorter (or maybe crunch time days were just passing by like crazy?) Besides that, it was really OK-ish year - I hope next one will be a bit slower than this one :)

All the best for the incoming 2020! 🎉🍾🎆

-- ł.