My coding year 2017

Resolutions from 2016

Here are my resolutions from 2016. I do not treat them as my main goals for a year, but I think its good to start with a little plan or direction. It doesn't matter if not everything works out as planned. That's life :-)

• Do at least three talks
• Become a chatbot expert
• Release a Laravel Spark SaaS application
• Improve my TDD skills
• I think it is time for a redesign of my blog (last update 2014 😱)

Let's take a look at each one of them.

Do at least three talks ✅

The emoji already shows that I can check that one. When you visit my quite new talks section, you will see that I did 7 talks in 2017. Now that I think about that number, I can't believe it. That's so much more than I thought I can do and I'm really proud of myself here. It still freaks me out when I have to speak in front of an audience, but I've done it again this year. I was able to push myself to the next level and I also had the chance to speak at a "real big" conference this year in Zagreb. I am still far away from calling myself a good speaker. I don't like my English and I still get quite nervous. But that's ok for now 😄

Become a chatbot expert ✅

On this one we can discuss a lot, but I would check that too. I've gained so much more experiences when it comes to chatbots this year. Next to my talks about them I also learned a lot while building more chatbots in 2017. At Liechtenecker we developed our first customers bots this year as well. Next to Facebook Messenger or Slack we also integrated them to our customers websites, which was really exciting. You can find the links to these project on my CV.

Release a Laravel Spark SaaS application ❌

Oh I failed this one so badly. In 2016 I have been putting a lot of work in a little SaaS application. It started as a project for family and turned out to be a nice idea for public project. The plan was to release a free version and think about providing a payed plan too. In 2017 I lost the motivation for this projects. I wasn't sure about its potential anymore and stopped working on it. In addition I had to spent more hours in the office which lead to less time for my side projects. I guess this should be totally ok and normal but it still gives me a bad feeling. So the dream of my little first own SaaS applications lives on.

Improve my TDD skills ✅

I didn't push myself to hard last year with calling it improve. In one year it should be quite easy to improve something and I definitely did that. I still don't do (and probably never will) full TDD but learning with every project more about how and what to test. And that was my goal. Keep testing and keep improving. I recently released a chatbot project with more than 100 tests and 700 assertions. While there a lot of duplicated assertions with chatbot testing, it still is by far the most tested product I've ever built.

I think it is time for a redesign of my blog (last update 2014 😱) ✅

The first time I started this article (almost 10 days ago) I didn't had a new site. I thought I maybe just could give the site a little fresh touch and that would be it. I planned to give me two days. Big fail! I have changed almost everything! New design, new backend, new deployment. Only the articles are the same. Almost :-)

Since this turned into a big redesign I want to tell you more about it in my next article. Stay tuned for that!

I'm off to new adventures

Some of you might have already heard that I will leave the company that I worked with now for almost 5 years called Liechtenecker. It was one of the toughest decisions I ever faced. There are so many happy memories connected with this company, the team and the projects. There is so much that I learned in this period and so much I'm thankful for. Besides all this I still felt that it was time for me to leave and this is what I do now.

I don't have a new job right now and I still don't know what I will do. This scares me as much as it excites me, but I know that it is a good thing and that I need that right now. I want to use some time now to think about what I really want to do with my life and especially what and how I want to work in the future. I can already tell you that I will continue coding because this is what I really enjoy. But this is all I know for now. This one decision makes sure that my 2018 will be quite a journey. Am I ready? I have no idea :-) Let's find out together.

My resolutions for 2018

It is quite difficult to define resolutions when you don't know what you will do the next year. Still I have goals and steps I can take that will help me get there:

• Find out how I want to work
• Find a job or create my own one
• Take the risk if there is a chance to make a dream come true
• Become a Laracon conference speaker

Wish you all the best for your new year and try to make it the best 2018 that it can get. This is what I will do. See ya 😁