So everybody writes about his 2018, so I'll "jump on the train" too!
Personal
This was the first complete year in my own flat, together with my girlfriend! All works fine :) My Parents visit us often, even if they live more than 600 km away.
If you ever have the chance to live in Bavaria, just do it! It is a wonderful place! I really love the silence in the "Bavarian forest", the air and the nature!
In the private everything works really great, but there is only one thing that is really annoying... my left shoulder.... it has been broken for three years. In these three years my shoulder is knocked out more than ten times. So I think it was the right time to go to a special doctor. I will have a surgery at the beginning of 2019, (7th January), then I will be "out of order" for a couple of weeks... but hopefully, yeah hopefully the shoulder is then fine!
We had a great holiday in Hurghada, the Hometown of Mohamed Said, one of the members of the Laravel Team. I didn't meet him, but hopefully next time we will find some time!
In 2018, I did a diver course with my girlfriend and her brother. It was really cool to be under water! Now I can't wait to dive in great places like Hurghada or the Maldives sometime!
My personal 2018 was great!
Work
As you may know, I work from my little home in Full-Time Home Office! I switched into the Home Office directly after my education (In Germany we call it "Ausbildung"), which I finished in July 2017! I worked for the Company for more than four 1/2 years, but then I decided to want a new challenge, learn something new and go out of my comfort zone. In my free time I worked on a Mobile App for the Hetzner Cloud, called "My Hetzner". Hetzner is one of the leading datacenter operators in the European Union. One of their employees wrote me on their forum and we began to chat. After some time he said, I should apply for a job at Hetzner. So I did it! I never thought that I will come in.... Because there are based in Munich, Nuremberg, Helsinki or Falkenstein and I don't want to relocate again... But now, after some conversations, I am an employee of the Hetzner Cloud Team in Munich! And the greatest: I can work in Home Office (Full Time)! I don't need to drive every day to Munich... Of course for such a great company like Hetzner is, I would do this! And now, I'm not a "Web Developer" anymore, I'm the "Technical Community Manager" for the Hetzner Cloud Product! I talk with many developers, maintain our integrations like the Terraform Provider, the hcloud-go (a Golang SDK for the Hetzner Cloud), our cli and much more! I learned two new programming languages in a couple of weeks: Go(lang) and Python! Two really cool languages! But I can not "leave my roots". I am a Laravel Developer and every project I started for my private side, was a Laravel Project! Even one little project in the company use Laravel!
My Side Projects
My Hetzner
My Hetzner Logo
A little Ionic Framework based App for controlling your Hetzner Services! It is an unofficial App, which uses the API`s from Hetzner under the hood.
Cloud-Mon.net
Cloud-Mon.net Logo
Cloud-Mon.net is a little "Cloud Monitoring Service" which monitors the API performance of some cloud providers like AWS, DigitalOcean, Linode or Hetzner Cloud. It creates real servers on these providers and wait until the server is ping able and it performs basic GET requests on the "List all servers"- Endpoint (which contain at least one server at all).
Laravel OneSignal Notification Channel
Together with David Llop I maintain the Laravel OneSignal Notification Channel. I's a really "quite" project, but it need his time! We have prepared a new major release some time ago, but we didn't get enough feedback to release it as a stable version. So if you use the package, please test the master-Branch!
Another hidden project
Some time ago I started a new project with Sven. I can not say much about it, because we are working on it in our free time and hope to share first details in the next weeks! I can say: It will be mind-blowing! We will make things, that other projects like ours not do :) If you are interested in testing it, write me :)
And 2019?
I really think 2019 will be a great year! Hopefully my surgery will help my shoulder. If not, then everything I planned for the year will need to be replanned!
In 2019, I planned to:
- Release the hidden side project
- Push my Golang and Python Skills forward!
- Make the "Gruppenführer" education for the fire department.
- Make more sports, i really hope I can play tennis again!
- Be less on the smartphone and have more time with my girlfriend
- Read more books
- Coming back to the weight I started in 2018 (my weight increased by 10 kg)
- Release a new 2019 Version of my homepage with tailwindcss and me-api.
Other great 2018 Recaps
- Mohamed Said
- Marcel Pociot
- Freek van der Herten
- David Llop
- You can find much more at https://www.a-year-review.tech/
And I need to say something at the end:
Sandy, my girlfriend, thank you for a really great year 2018! Every moment we live together now after more than three years long-distance relationship is so beautiful! We live here in our own flat now for one and a half year and it feels like home! Thank you for being you, thank you for keeping me in check (I am horrible because I always want to buy useless and expensive stuff :D)! Thank you for your time! I love you!