2020: My year in the pandemic

Welcome to my blog and my yearly "review". The year still have a few days left, but i want to dedicate the whole time over the holidays to family and my girlfriend, because of this i publish my year review already today :)

This year was crazy for me, as for I guess everyone else on earth. Luckily, I was not personally affected by COVID-19, no one from my family was infected or did lose something, but I guess we are a luckily exception here.

Everyone who loosed someone within this difficult year: My condolences for your loss.

We have shown that humanity is strong and we can work together on something difficult. I know there are some people who don't think that the pandemic is real, but yeah I don't want to brother someone here.

Okay now let's start with my year. I will cluster it a bit this year. I start with my personal achievements within 2020.

Personal 2020

I am engaged!

This was my most exciting goal for 2020. I wanted to marry my girlfriend this year too, but yeah corona didn't make it that easy. So we will marry next year :)

We chose our place on earth!

We were already looking for a long time for our place where we build our house. We found something "right on the other side of the street" we are currently living at. There will be a new building area. We hoped really that we can already start this year with building it, but yeah .... the progress of the building area was not as promised, so we hope to start with it next year!

I got also a new car because my loved Golf 5 broke back in June. I now drive a Tiguan model which is a really cool car :)

Work-Year 2020

Most of you had a big change within your work year or? Yeah, Home-Office for everyone (how can work from home)! For me, it was just normal, as I work in Full-Time Homeoffice for three years now. I really don't want to go back to the normal office working.

But all my colleagues @Hetzner-Cloud went to Full-Time Homeoffice back in march too. Therefore it changed a lot. We now have a Mumble server running (something like Teamspeak, but OpenSource) where we talk similar to how it would be in the office. It works really fine.

Within 2020 we launched a really cool and long-awaited feature at work - Managed Load Balancer. We worked on it since the end of 2019 and were a bit slowed down because of Corona, but we did it and it works really great!

But that is not the only stuff I did. I still manage all the official Hetzner Cloud integrations. I attended with our DevOps guys a small conference called "cfgmgmt Camp" back in February. There no one thought that this is the only conference this year! We planed to attend Kubecon EU & Laracon EU in Amsterdam as well. A few other things I did within this year, I'm really proud of them :)

Hetzner Prometheus Service Discovery

Back in August, I contributed a Hetzner Service Discovery to Prometheus. A big thank you goes out to Julien Pivotto who helped me a lot! You can read a bit over it here: Hetzner Service Discovery

Hetzner Cloud read-only API Token

Yep, I implemented all the backend related stuff for the read-only API tokens :) It was cool work and I'm really proud that it worked so well.

Secret WIP feature

We are working on a cool new feature :) I did a bigger part of it and it was a real challenge! I guess it will be announced soon, but we still need to do a bit for it to become real :)

A big shoutout and Thank-You goes to my colleagues @F., for helping me a lot with our awesome integrations and for our great architecture discussions and our daily Mumbling :D

@D. for helping or guiding me in the right directions with the not announced yet feature

And of course on all the other colleagues that worked with me this crazy year.

Working at Hetzner Cloud is so awesome! It is really great to have such nice, friendly, and professionally strong people around me!

Open-Source

I spend a bit of my free time working on several open-source projects. A lot of them (all Hetzner Cloud related stuff) is already written about above, but in 2020 i did something more :)

Prometheus PHP SDK/Prom PHP Org

I use Prometheus to gather metrics about my several applications. All of them are written in PHP. I mostly used a PHP package from endclothing for this. Sadly the package was not well maintained anymore, so I decided to fork it and fix the issues there. And so the `PromPHP` - Github organization was born, after a bit of writing with the Prometheus team to be on the official Prometheus homepage.

https://github.com/PromPHP/prometheus_client_php/releases

After the initial release, a few really cool people joined to help. There are Rafael Dohms and Nick Poulos (+ Team) who now help to maintain this awesome library. We already published a few releases with smaller improvements. At the moment we have a few more contributions from the community that will be released after the holidays.

The packages were released back in September and till today the Prometheus client was downloaded more than 25.000 times, the Pushgateway support was downloaded around 2.000 times.

All packages that I maintain were now around 50.000 times downloaded, WOW! That is awesome! I want to thank everyone how contributed or used my libraries/tools. Thank you!

Side - Business LK-Development

I have a small side business now for around seven years. Within the last two years, the gain I get from the business started to raise. I have a great partnership with Digitalbynature, an agency from near cologne. I worked with them (or with Markus :)) now for around three years. We already worked together on a lot of awesome stuff, mostly I make the backend part and he/his Team the frontend part. It works quite well and I'm really happy that my girlfriend supports me here, by giving me a lot of time. Of course, i have my normal work hours, so I need to work after my work at Hetzner Cloud. It works really well and makes a lot of fun :)

But I try to be independent as much as possible, I wanted to get my own feet on the ground instead of relying on another partner, and yep I got it "working" this year!

I create a mobile app for my living city here. ZENTING.APP is an easy and fast way for the municipality of Zenting to distribute important information and messages to the citizens of the municipality. The app is used really great :) Since the start we already had around 600 known devices (iOS & Android), by a citizen count of around 1000, that is really awesome!

I also started to help out at PingPing.io, a great uptime monitoring service where I maintain the infrastructure and help a bit with developing some stuff.

I also relaunched the homepage for my local fire brigade, developed an appointment planing for a local physiotherapist, started working on a new homepage for Bildungswerk Westafrika, a Non-profit association where my father is the chairman, and many other things.

Okay, that were now all the achievements, but yeah. I need to be honest with myself. Corona hurt a bit, I increased my weight again to nearly 100kg, I was at 105 kg on my badest times this year. I really want to get this down again next year. I want to get healthier too.

But overall 2020 was a great year. I had a lot of great corona-quarantine time with my girlfriend, we tried to make a bit of holiday when it was allowed, we had a great week back in September. I really hope that everything will recover in the next year(s) and we flight to different places in the world again.

So yep, this was now my 2020 year in review. Thank you for reading it, I wish you, your family, and everyone you like all the best for 2021 and stay healthy!

You have a year review too? Cool! I would like to post it below as well! Just write to me and I will add it :)