The past twelve months have been quite a ride. I remember starting the year helping to shape and rebuild Hygraph into the service that's handling millions of requests per day.
With a completely overhauled backend infrastructure, I was in charge of rebuilding the mutation layer, as well as sortable relations, union types, and other features our customers require for their projects. Never have I learned more about SQL, Postgres, GraphQL, and other technologies than in those months.
In March, the pandemic started impacting the status quo and we transitioned to working from home. This was a huge change, both for me personally, and the team and company culture as a whole.
Nevertheless, we continued building and launched the new product in April.
As I spent more time working from home, I began thinking about what I really missed and quickly came to the conclusion that in addition to traveling without the current restrictions (and obviously the health risk), I wanted to get another shot at meeting people of my age.
Thus I decided to enroll in an undergraduate degree combining management and technology at the Technical University of Munich. It's quite maths-heavy but otherwise enjoyable. The part about meeting people wasn't as thought through, I'll have to wait another couple of months before anything near that becomes possible again.
In the past months, I started exercising more regularly, as I came to see the importance of staying healthy in those crazy times. I also consumed more resources on productivity than I should have, and started journalling, which helps to offload a lot of unimportant things.
I rebuilt my portfolio in October and published a total of 55 blog posts (+1 counting the one you're reading right now) this year (to date), and I've got a lot more coming up next year.
I started working on iOS applications in November, and feel like I learned a lot already, even if I would consider myself relatively new to the mobile development ecosystem.
In addition to publishing more resources on this topic, I'd love to create a real course around modern mobile application development with SwiftUI and other technologies, maybe in the style of a cohort-based version that really engages with participants, because that will ultimately make a difference.
Of course, that's just an early idea and will need more polishing, but I could imagine some people might be interested in that, at least I would have loved something like this when I started out.
Obviously, I'll continue to build great features with the amazing team at Hygraph, I'm thrilled to see what's coming up next, I can already tell you that we've got some exciting releases coming up soon.
So that's the ambitious roadmap for 2021 onward, tl;dr:
- Staying healthy is probably the most important point on this list, so that takes the first place
- I'll build exciting new features at Hygraph and keep improving systems
- I'll continue working toward my degree at TUM
- I'll continue to write and publish a lot of posts
- I'm planning more resources on mobile application / full-stack development
See you next year, or in around 48 hours.