My 2019: A 🤯 Year 🤩

So 2019 is now mostly done. Only a few days will be left. And so I will write my recap for 2019. It was an incredible year. I have met great new people (mostly at LaraconEU). But let's start:

Personal

The year started with a long overdue surgery, I was out of order for at least two months, but I would do it again. As of the day, I didn't have any problem with my left shoulder, so everything worked as expected. I can live again as my before my first should `knock out`.  

And the year had some more personal stuff included 🤓...

• Working on reducing my weight again (It worked! Starting as of Aug. I have loosed at least 6 kg (even trough Christmas!!). I did a "Biggest Loser" - Challange with my girlfriend and her family. We all together loosed more than 25 kg!
• Working on my English skills - it is better, but still not so great as it could be
• Reserved a ground for a house with my girlfriend - 1.150 square meters (will be bought in the next few months)
• Drove more than 30.000 km (to my parents, to my company, to the supermarket)
• Attended my first conference @LaraconEU (🥳, thanks to @HetznerCloud)
• Had a fantastic holiday @ Hurghada (will be there in 2020 again) - Only downside: 40 mosquito bites.
• Did the `Gruppenführer` education for the fire brigade
• Had my first alarm as `Gruppenführer`
• Integrated monitoring and home assistant into our apartment (my girlfriend still doesn't like Alexa as i do)

And of course, I met some incredibly cool people. I met some of the most known Laravel Community Members, like Freek Van der Herten, Marcel Pociot, Christoph Rumpel, Dries Vints, Bobby Bouwmann, Stephan Bauer (the beer with all of them was cool 🤩), Miguel Piedrafita, Caneco and of course Taylor Otwell (itself!) This was cool with all of you guys at LaraconEU! Hopefully, I can attend next year again!

Work-related

So I still work for Hetzner Cloud :) My position slightly changed, I'm no longer only the Technical Community Manager. I'm not (as of July) a fully backed "Software Developer". As of July i officially develop on the Backend Team instead of only the integrations. 🥳 I have already published some smaller features in the cloud, and with the project, we are working on, I'm entirely integrated into the backend.  

At the moment, I can not tell more about the big project we are working on :) But it is impressive and mind-blowing. 

Side Projects

On the Side Projects front, I did not so much work this year. I worked some time for (or with) Stefan Bauer on Pingping. I have added monitoring for the underlying servers and added some smaller features.

I have developed a small warehouse and book holding system for the parents of my girlfriend, as they started to sell things on a Christmas market, they plan to sell items online too in the next few months so I will try to help them there also. 

I wrote a small HelpDesk Solution, which is still work in progress but nothing special... I would say it will exist only for my projects...

Side Business

On my Side Business (or Freelancing) front, I did much more in 2019. I doubled my incoming with a specific customer, and I hope I can duplicate it again next year. 

So what is planned for 2020?

At least not much.... My girlfriend and I plan to build a house next year, and maybe we start thinking about children. (Ok, we already did thinking about children...) I plan to increase my skills (On Linux, Python, and Go) more (and improve my English....), and I plan to attend the Laracon EU again. I also plan to blog more about my HomeOffice Work, my projects, my servers, and setups. 

Thank you for reading this :)