You'll look at what I've done this year and find most of what I care to mention is from the last third of the year. I'm suppressing some things, but the first half of this year was rough.
2019 was no home-run for me and could have gone better. I salvaged what I could and learned from the rest.
This September I moved to Seattle from San Francisco. I spent just over a year in total living in SF and was ready for a change. I now have a place all to myself in another major US city.
So far, I have enjoyed Seattle. In a lot of ways, I'm learning from my mistakes in SF and making more of the city and getting outside in all the nature a lot more.
This year I surpassed 100 published web comics. This is one of the creative goals I set for myself near the end of the year and I pushed myself to see it through. With a collection like this, I feel like I have developed my own, depressing set of emoji.
I probably won't be setting more goals for my comics going forward. The spontaneous "I just have to capture this now" passion is what I've come enjoy, and I can't schedule that.
I made two games, Prime Time and Re:Move. Both are handwritten in Elm, open source, and received pretty warm receptions.
I quite like making these small video games. They have been a pretty good investment, if only as items on the ice breaker stockpile.
Combined with my earlier games and 2018's Urinal Picker, I feel like I've built quite the studio. If only I could design a game that wasn't inspired by wanting to troll and annoy my friends.
I wrote four more fictional short stories: Cube One, Moonshot, Death Bed, and Retry Logic.
I am both not sure what I'm doing and want to do more of it in regards to fiction writing.
I read one book lent to me by a friend called The Three Body Problem. I also read most of Mindset before trailing off.
This got a dedicated article.
Like I said at the end of 2018, open source was not going to be a priority for me in 2019. Besides the above games, a time tracking tool, and some maintainer upkeep for existing projects, I was absent. I am not optimistic 2020 will be any different.
Nothing too wild here I'm afraid. As a consultant, I had no choice but to travel for work but no more of that.
I did go to Austin and Seattle (before deciding to move) in the summer.
I went home to Erie twice for two weeks as well, working remotely. These trips home are weird in that they can feel both too long and short of visits at the same time.
Seattle has many places to explore and I've made a point to visit some of the major parks here.
I have been at Stripe for over a year now. Somehow it feels like I've worked there for much longer than that.
In 2018 at Stripe, I was doing was backend and infrastructure work. Boy, did that change and by change I mean continually expand. JavaScript came back in a big way and I built the full product experience for my team's first user-facing feature, custom email domains. I did everything: design, user documentation, front-end, back-end, infrastructure.
Stripe's user-first approach yields a whole bunch of challenges I have not found elsewhere. Building high qualify user experiences at scale is my current focus, and should be next year as well.
In September I got proactive about setting goals outside of work. I made a list of things I wanted to see done by the end of the year. Every night I'd have the list open and review what I could be doing, and did complete most of them. This included drawing more comics, writing more stories, securing my online accounts, and re-doing my finances.
I think I'll be dropping the creative goals since I don't like forcing those. Otherwise, I found it to be a very positive motivator and will continue with it. I recommend giving it a try, especially since it is light-weight.
Next year, there's so much I want to do. Looking at my next list of goals, I want to read a bit more, travel a lot more, make more friends (every jump to a new city means starting from scratch), and continue experimenting with ways to express myself.
Happy New Year!