In 2013, I only published five posts on this blog. That’s probably an all time low. It doesn’t mean I was relaxing, I was busier then ever, but didn’t get around to writing much about it. Until now.
A quick note before we get started. Obviously, I’m only talking about my job and business in this post. I prefer not too share too much of my private going-ons.
In 2013
- My full time job was all about running web applications, continuous integration, almost-continuous delivery. And at the same time refactoring, extending and improving the application with major new features.
- Pretty much the same thing happened for FCTR, my Vaadin application on Google AppEngine for SMBs. The application did great and it got a lot of new and satisfied customers. I’m happy about how that went.
- I had very few, but awesome, clients. Mostly regarding small maintenance tasks on PHP sites.
Thanks to a great team at my day job, we set up a reliable build and deployment system. Deployment is no longer scary. This was a major milestone and it has allowed us to continue to provide value, even while we restructured the entire codebase and the way of the application works.
I applied the same principles to my own AppEngine project. Even if my time was severely limited, I was able to keep everything running and add a feature or two. Which might not sound like much, but everything considered, that’s pretty good.
Sadly, I wasn’t able to get to much of my other goals:
- Due to changing priorities and teams, I hardly got into big data.
- I did not get any work done on my Android application. Even though I’ve had many inquiries for additional features that people actually want to pay for.
- Instead of NodeJS projects, we did manage to pull of a great project with AngularJS.
2014
I’ve kept the scope of next year pretty narrow, because I don’t expect to have much more time.
- For FCTR, I plan to focus on making the existing users happier, with an improved and responsive user interface and cleaner data entry. This, combined with some content marketing, in turn should also improve conversion rates, which are a bit on the low side right now (I only recently started to properly monitor those)
- To get progress in Discogs Scan, I may outsource some or all of the work.
- I’m really going to do my best to write smore posts about the above two on this blog.
Have fun closing 2013 and starting 2014.
PS If you are one of the few people still reading through RSS, I switched the sites theme to the latest WordPress Twenty Fourteen theme. I love that one.