Happy new year — 2021🎊

Failures and stories of 2020, hopes and dreams of 2021🎊

Photo by Damon On Road from Unsplash

Hey there 👋 Happy New Year of 2021. The tradition is settled already, to extend thanks and warm wishes not only to my blog readers, those who bought my yet to be updated book, and those who use my online products! 🙏🏻

Other previously published blogs are the 2020, 2019, 2018. Those that never made it are 2017 and 2016, and a procrastinated of 2015.

2020 wasn’t that great from a life and product development perspective in general, but really rewarding from personal and career perspectives, writing, and I wish that was the case for you. Whatever it's shortcomings maybe, I hope you find ways to enjoy the upcoming 2021.

2020

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• Things started on the wrong footing with the Corona Virus. The number of artists this took with it is staggering. T’Challa (a.k.a Chadwick Aaron Boseman), Sean Connery, Olivia de Havilland, Diego Maradona ~ the list goes on.
• Personal note ~ If 2019 marked my life with fatherhood, 2020 tested how my fatherhood’s effectiveness and patience. I have to admit that I am still learning. The sales of my first ebook are around 20 copies ~ Far more than what I have expected from the first version without marketing. 👌
• Changing jobs ~ I was fortunate enough to land two great job offers, around the same time. I moved on to work with RBC on their business side. It is rewarding to know that those small business owners have a flawless banking experience as just the rest of other customers. 👌
• Content ~ The source of most visits are on Quora, Medium, Simple.works and Simple.blog.Without publishing new content consistently, these sources doubled readership. The next step is building un a presence on StackOverflow in categories where my knowledge can help fellow developers. 👌
• Sleeping ~ Kept my promise to sleep 8 hours. That translated into dedicating remaining hours to things deemed more important.
• Minimalism ~ From practice to actually incorporate some principles into my day-to-day work ~ minimalism is really my way of life now. 👌
• Gardening ~ On the sustainability and frugal- ism front, I was able to double the production of my vegetables by doubling the planting bed size, for the second year in a row. Canada is as cold as the bottom of a glacier. Still, that is not an excuse for not producing vegetables all year round. 👌
• Failures ~ making my own beer(or wine). There were just enough on my plate to postpone this thing. The second version of the book. I have to revisit my strategy and better identify areas folks are not making progress. I have made some explorations on containerization(Docker + Kubernetes), new runtime, and the main programming language that powers it(Deno + Rust), gRPC, and performance analysis. Woodworking ~ Haven’t started this thing yet

2021

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Coming 2021, 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, why not generations to come?

• Family man ~ Be with my family often, sleeping 8 hours, and teach my son how to just do that, explore photography and improve my garden with better tasting produces 🤷🏿‍♂️ 🔥
• Writing ~ The number of visitors doubled in 2019. That is a vanity metrics, to run away from that, the writing will have to be channeled close to those in need. That includes answering questions(Quora/StackOverflow), recycling blog posts into enriched ebooks. It is ideal that every ebook created have its own website so that folks can get updates they come in. 🔥

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

• Books ~ The first version of “Testing nodejs applications” will need some updates and marketing. A second edition has to follow the JTBD and Demand-side sales as marketing baseline techniques. The research can yield content that provides answers to problems folks are struggling with. 🔥
• Side project ~ The mission of Hoo.gy is to make consumerism responsible, with re-use. However, given the complexity of people’s needs 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. The development is still underway, after almost two years of halt. 🔥
• Side project strategy ~ For any project to succeed, making money is paramount. Integrating with existing systems, opening up some of the systems as an API can help create some cashflow, providing a free inventory/order management system can help solve the chicken-and-egg problem. 🔥
• Gardening ~ In 2019, as well as 2020, I was able to produce double the produce on double growing space. That is not scalable, I am still pondering on going vertical, as well as producing vegetables all year round. This year’s potatoes harvest made me wonder “What makes potatoes taste a little better”. As you may have guessed, this year’s potatoes tasted like crap, and I can’t wait to fix it in the upcoming 2021 season 🔥
• Woodworking ~ as far as I can remember, I am curious and love to make things. I have been always fascinated with the 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 is quite an amount of non-decomposable garbage that is thrown in the wasteland, thanks in part to fast cheap fashion. Ideally, I will not be buying new clothes this year again, only used and equip myself with the ability to repair my old clothes(haven’t gotten the sewing machine yet, but still on tab). There are services such as Yerdle to buy new clothes. 🔥
• Have been wanting to explore photography, I treated my self with a Camera (Canon EOS Rebel T7i). The next step is exploring what that thing is made of. 👌
• Alcohol ~ this commodity takes a good chunk of my monthly budget. I postponed making my own beer/wine for a decade now. Buying used or renting out pieces of equipment can be a good starting point, to test waters and see If can actually make that dream a reality.🔥
• Reading ~ I managed to read Ryan Singer’s Alan Klement’s “When Coffee and Kale Compete”, Un-finished Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential”, Martin Fawler’s “Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code (2nd edition)”, “Demand-side sales 101: Stop Selling and Help your Customers make progress” ~ Bob Moesta, “The 99% Invisible City: A field guide to the hidden world of everyday design” ~ Roman Mars( my first architecture book). Priority should probably be to finalize those unfinished books first, but looking forward to attacking Walter Isaacson’s “Leonardo da Vinci’, Yuval Noah Harari collection “Sapiens, Home Deus and 21 lessons from 21st century”, Barack Obama’s “A Promised Land” (books already secured), and probably re-read DevOps books (Docker/Kubernetes/Cloud-native and Infrastructure as code related subjects), as I update my own book. 🔥

Summary

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As I always did for past years, would like to mention that the aforementioned are just north-star kind. They can change anytime, and that will not keep me awake at night. I stick to minimalism and JTBD.

I can’t do this without people who keep motivating me, 300+ members currently using Hoo.gy, 20+ people who bought my book up to today. 🙏 Happy New Year of 2021, 2020 was a heck of a rollercoaster, and can’t wait to see you all in 2021. Much Blessings.

Originally published at https://getsimple.blog on January 1, 2021.