This year 2020 was full of surprises and ups and downs. I felt this year like a surfer, always on the next wave. I was really excited to hop into the year 2020, but somehow things didn't go well or go really well.

In this small post, I will close this year for myself.

Highlights

• Health and Fitness — I started intermittent fasting and got pretty shredded. In addition, I fell in love with home and bodyweight training.
• Career — I got a job as a Softwarearchitect at T-Systems International GmbH, and so far, I am pretty happy with it.
• Education — I've finished my Bachelor's with a satisfying grade and will continue learning in 2021.
• Financial — I started investing in stocks and learned a lot about smart and long-term investments.
• Playing Piano — I practiced a lot playing the piano. My favorite songs of 2020 were Gnossienne No. 1 by Erik Satie, Dance Monkey by Tones and I, and Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven.
• A lot of coding — I spent almost everything coding on a project. Even if it is a simple readme file change.
• Dope YouTube stats — I don't really care about numbers, but I've reached over 100.000 views and 2000 subscribers this year.
• Editing videos — I've finally found my preferred way of editing videos after a lot of testing.
• Livestreaming — I engaged with the viewers in four total livestreams. This isn't a lot, but this will change in 2021.

Personal

2020 was pretty testing like year where I tried to test many things and experience new things. Honestly, I am not satisfied enough with the experiences I had this year. But I will try to change this next year by building new things or simply trying new things.

Besides that, I think I wasted a lot of time on the phone and watching social media or playing useless stuff. I will reduce the time spent on useless things like social media or playing in the upcoming year.

Health and Fitness

Even if this year was a i will stay inside year I've used my body and my brain to experiment with a diet and home training. I personally really enjoy lifting weights at home because you can adjust your training dynamically. For instance, you can focus on doing on the one day a really intense workout and on the other day a more fast workout with lighter weights but more reps. In the gym, it is tough to do this. Therefore I canceled my membership at the gym.

In addition to my fitness that totally improved this year, I learned a lot about diet, our body, and how food affects the brain. I've read some books about food and their nutrient. I did not think it would interest me, but I am more interested in brain health and health in general than ever before.

Education

This year I've finished my Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science. Honestly, I've learned more at work than at university. Therefore, I will ask myself if a Master's Degree in Computer Science is really useful in the next year. I might ask myself if it is fulfilling and if it does make sense. Or is it more beneficial to earn a lot of experience at work and earn certificates about specific technologies. Furthermore, I've learned a lot about the math behind Machine and Deep Learning. In the upcoming year, I will try to do a follow-up with the math of Machine Learning, which reflects my interests. Maybe there is some combination of Health/Nutrition and Machine Learning.

Besides the degree, I learned some new frameworks and languages like Golang. You can build amazing microservices with Golang and language-specific frameworks like Gorilla or gRPC. This year I started a new project to rebuild Instagram with Golang microservices backend and a simple Vue.js frontend. I will try to finish this project this year.

In addition, I've read some books, but not a lot. I will try to change this in the coming year. Also, I tried to read Sci-fi books which are really interesting because you might learn new things and strengthen your creativity about the future. Everything is possible.

Furthermore, I learned a lot about playing the piano. Therefore, this skill has nothing to do with programming or software development and is a really nice hobby I would like to do more often.

Open Source contribution

I really contributed a lot to personal and private projects on GitHub. However, I am not happy with the contribution in public open source repositories at all. I will try to focus more on that in the upcoming year. On GitHub I had 3.611 commits in 2020 and created over 15 projects. Furthermore, I started a lot of projects without even finishing them. I will try to finish them and therefore clean up my profile this year.

Projects I want to finish in 2021:

• Flex Vis An old project that is kind of finished.
• VGQL A CLI for generating Vue.js in the frontend and GraphQL in the backend projects.
• Insta Clone A scalable Instagram clone written in Golang and Vue.js.

Personal Plans for 2021

Here is a small list of my personal plans for the upcoming year:

• Reading 12 books in 12 months
• Finishing all unfinished projects on GitHub
• Contribute to at least five open source projects
• Read more scientific papers about Health and Machine Learning
• Regular journaling about work stuff
• Reduce social media and phone addiction to a minimal 1-2 hours a day

Business

There were a lot of changes this year because I actually got my first full-time job as a Softwarearchitect. Furthermore, I came up with a lot of business opportunities I will try to tackle this year. I had a lot of ideas that I will try to create this year.

Career

Right now, I am a simple Softwarearchitect at T-Systems International GmbH. Besides that, I try to build things in my free time and educate the world about the future and programming.

I have some plans for the year 2021 like starting a podcast or writing more often. I will try to handle all of that in the upcoming year. So it could be fun ;)

Daycademy

This year was a redesign and create year for Daycademy. I came up with the ideas this year, and I made a lot of good progress. The academy is kind of in a release phase, and I am working towards it in the upcoming year. However, there were some fundamental changes to the design and the development. I redesigned the academy and the landing page from scratch, and now I am pretty happy with the result.

Furthermore, there were a lot of technical challenges for me. For instance, the idea of having a sandbox environment for executing code in the browser was tough. I had to create a lot of bash scripts and think about a clever solution. Same thing for the backend. The challenge in the backend was to actually create an efficient and scalable infrastructure. I am not happy with it, but I will try to work it out in 2021.

Here are some contribution stats on GitHub:

• Started mid-March
• Created 13 repositories
• 2.067 commits

YouTube

2020 was a really good year in terms of the numbers of my YouTube channel. I really couldn't believe that I would ever have 1000 subscribers on a YouTube channel. This was a magic number for me, and I am really proud of it because I created educational videos constantly. In addition, I've found my style of editing videos, which was a tough process of trial and error. Below you can see this year's YouTube stats.

In 2021 I will try to create more and better videos. I will level up my editing skills.

The three most popular videos of 2020 were:

1. First Vue.js course video (18.998 views)
2. Second Vue.js course video (8.078 views)
3. What is variance and standard deviation (7.006 views)

So far, I am pretty happy with how the YouTube channel evolves and I am seeing this as a hobby.

Financial

I learned a lot about investing and economics this year. However, I personally think that you cannot know enough about investing and economics. Therefore, I will try to level up my game in economics this year by attending courses or reading books and learning about some economics. Personally, I think economics is an interesting topic to learn more about. In addition, I will raise my investments per month to even save more money in stocks.

I have no real business-related financial plans or goals. All I know is that I want to reinvest in the company I will create to create even more and better products for the world. There are too many useless overpaid products on the market.

Business Plans for 2021

Here is a small list of my business-related plans for the upcoming year:

• Try to livestream once a month on YouTube.
• Creating the company and releasing Daycademy.
• Releasing a minimum of three top-tier free courses on YouTube and Daycademy.
• Creating more content for simple advertising of Daycademy on social media platforms
• Starting a podcast and write more often
• Finish up the AI video course with videos about neural networks

Let's jump into the cold water of 2021!