Happy new year — 2020🎊

Failures and stories of 2019, hopes and dreams of 2020🎊

Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash

Hey there 👋 Happy New Year of 2020. Can you believe it is an end of a decade ? As it is becoming a tradition now, I would like to thank you for reading our my, motivations and suggestions you send to me be in public or private really make me sticking to my pen(keyboard)! It is always nice to hear from you, and I can’t thank you enough for that.

As part of this new tradition, I will extend thanks and warm wishes not only to the blog readers, but also to those who use my online products or those who bought my new book! 🙏🏻

Other previously published blogs are the 2019, 2018. Those that never made it are 2017 and 2016, and a procrastinated of 2015.

Without further due, here is a highlight of what we made together in 2019, shortcomings and what I think you will enjoy in 2020.

2019

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• Elon Musk launched a weird yet popular vehicle. It is called a CyberTruck. Greta (Tintin Eleonora Ernman) Thunberg warned us about that our “house is on fire”, Voyager 2 reached the interstellar medium. On sad note, Cassini plunged into Saturn and VW stopped R&D of the e-Golf. 👌
• On personal note, this year will forever be marked in my life with two major life changing events: the birth of my first rainbow baby boy and finally publishing my first ebook. That positive energy is going to be reflected in my other products and services. 👌
• Moved all my writings, and code into a monorepo. This approach of working tries to maximize the the rate at which the content is produced versus the rate at it produces results, or throughput, at the same time enhancing the adoption of "publish on your own website, syndicate everywhere" mantra. This is the second of those articles edited from the monorepo architecture, the book being the first. 👌
• I was able to double daily visits, without publishing new content consistently. Quora remains the major source of referral to all my websites. Regardless of not having new answers this year. 👌
• I work on writing and other side projects after regular work hours. You add a new born to the mix and you get a really small time dedicated to anything else. I manage to read when he is playing, and catching news when feeding or making him sleep. In such an environment, every second counts, and waiting an hour for a computer to just boot no longer a healthy option for me. I have to be honest that I do not share this opinion, for that matter the next action, with my girlfriend. After a good 9 years ride, I finally ditched my 2011 13' MacBook Pro, for a top-end super performant 16' 2019 MacBook Pro. I struggled with the idea of buying this equipment, unfortunately the needs of Chrome browser in terms of memory left me with no other alternative! I must admit that it is really a good piece of equipments, though. 👌
• Minimalism ~ I practice minimalism on every aspect of my life now. I focus on one thing a time, and stopped worrying about deadlines. That helped me overcome burnouts, and rethinking the way I look at life in particular, and business in general. I sleep the minimum of 8 hours a day, one hour of work is just one hour of work, after work hours are for my sanity and my family. 👌
• On sustainability and frugal- ism front, I was able to double the production of my vegetables by doubling the planting bed size. I am still aiming at a more self sustainable household, to be able to produce vegetables all year around. Canada is not a joke when it comes to winters, it is as cold as at the bottom of a glacier. Read below in objectives how I plan to do just that. 👌

2020

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Coming 2020, the following is a non-exhaustive, non-exhausting list of things I wish to accomplish. There is no deadline on them, just north star of where I want to be at the end of the year, and probably generations to come.

• Be with my family often, and ability to keep those two universes separate is at the top of my priorities.
• Sleeping 8 hours, and teach my son how to just do that, comes second in the list. All things that we do, should not impede ability of our bodies to recover, unless we have really exceptional circumstances such as a war time 🤷🏿‍♂️ 🔥
• The number of visitors doubled last year, but still low compared to levels I think should be satisfactory, regardless, there is definitely a trend. I always see the blogging as a way to communicate with others and better organize my thoughts and projects. Like I did last year,the objective is to double views on all blogging platforms to double the count by posting answers that are related to those answers that proven to perform better, providing more insight on content that proved to bring in more visitors, and automating cross posting by making syndication a part of content production pipeline. I already have ready but unpublished blog posts that can be updated, published and syndicated. Some of those blog posts can be recycled, enriched and made into more ebooks. 🔥

Other places where I blog or post content are: dev.to/murindwaz, GetSimpleWorks for engineering subjects, GetSimpleBlog for personal and business, Medium.com and Quora

In case you are wondering, this is my current no-brainer publication pipeline

My publication pipeline takes raw Markdown text and publishes manually to blogs. These blogs are powered by write.as. From there, I manually cross post content to publications media and systems such as dev.to, and then sharable content to various social media. The whole process is manual, but would be great to automate it as well. That can be feasible if I leverage the power of RSS feeds, serverless computing and YAML front-matter.

• The first version of “Testing nodejs applications” will need some updates and publicity. This year may inspire me with a followup with a second edition, major content upgrades, and opening help channels to make sure the book get an even bigger impact on those who bought it. 🔥
• Some people have excess, others struggle to survive, and some others are in between like ham in a sandwich bread. The mission of Hoo.gy is to bridge that gap and makes sure those willing to reduce their carbon footprint, have reliable tools to do so, while allowing those struggling to have decent access. For this the platform needs to integrate with existing systems capable of identifying when resources are underused, and providing information to those needing to have access to those resources at a cheaper price, if not free of charge. 🔥
• To make the mission possible, and potentially making money to support the project, the iterations have to be faster. Like the content does, the code for the project will become a monorepo as well. On integrating other systems, the plugin has to go live, and eventually the rewrite of the application will follow. Open up some of the system as an API can help increase some cashflow, and providing on open and free inventory management system, can help solve the chicken-and-egg problem. 🔥
• I stopped a couple months the migration from Angular to React of Hoo.gy, to be sure I finalize the testing book first. I also postponed bundling “Angularjs migration to Angular” and *** “The Productive Solopreneur” for the same reasons. 🔥
• In life as in business, I am a minimalist. This will impact delivery pipeline. So few, but working things are going to see the sunlight. Whereas others are not to see the sunlight in 2020. There is however some sustainability that are too close to my heart. Those are in the following paragraphs
• Gardening ~ in an urban farming setting, in 2019 I was able to produce double the produce on a double growing space. This time I am planning on going vertical, and aim at producing my vegetables all year round. 🔥
• Woodworking ~ as far as I can remember, I am curious and love to make things. I have been always fascinated with wonders Japanese joinery can do. It would be awesome to be able to make my own greenhouses and planting beds out of reclaimed wood.🔥
• Clothing ~ There are quite amount of non-decomposable garbage that is thrown in wasteland, thanks in part to fast cheap fashion. Ideally, I will not be buying new clothes, only used and equip myself with ability to repair my old clothes. There are services such as Yerdle to buy new clothes. 🔥
• Alcohol ~ this commodity takes a good chunk in my monthly budget. I postponed making my own beer/wine for a decade now. Buying used or renting out equipments can be a good starting point, to test waters and see If can actually make that dream a reality.🔥
• Reading ~ I managed to read Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers, Blink and The tipping point”, John Urschell’s “Mind and Matter”, Michael Nielsen’s “Neural Networks And Deep Learning”, Ryan Singer’s , Started George Orwell’s “1984” and Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential”. My priority on reading front, should probably be to finalize those books I already started, and attack Walter Isaacson’s “Leonaldo da Vinci’, Yuval Noah Harari collection “Sapiens, Home deus and 21 lessons from 21st century” (books already secured), and probably some more Artificial Intelligence, Math and DevOps(Docker/Kubernetes/Cloud native and Infrastructure as code related subjects), before I update my own book. 🔥

Summary

I would like to mention that aforementioned are just north-star. They can change anytime, and that will not keep me awake at night. I stick to minimalism, and most recently, shape up strategy.

I can’t do this without people who keep motivating me, and 300+ members currently using Hoo.gy. 🙏 Happy New Year of 2020, 2019 was a heck of ride, and can’t wait to see you all in 2019. Much Blessings.

Originally published at https://getsimple.blog on December 31, 2019.