Although the year has already started, and we’re right at the end of January 2021, I still want to continue writing end-of-year reviews. The year 2020 was a special year for most people around the world.
There are many different topics I want to address. Feel free to read only those topics that are interesting to you. I write this post not only for you but also for me to be able to look back in the future.
Blogging
In 2020, I wrote 20 blog posts – most of them at the beginning of the year. I traditionally take a break from most work activities during Summer. In the second half of the year, I didn’t spend that much time writing.
After hitting my 10th anniversary with this blog at the end of 2018, there was no special event in 2020. I continue writing blog posts about things I want to share with the world and where I think I can add value.
In 2020, my blog got about 192’000 page views. Compared to 2019, where the blog got about 150’000 page views, this is an increase of 28%.
While collecting the data to write this post, I cannot think of a reason for that increase. I expected a drop off because I dedicated more time to blogging the year before. Maybe people clicked through from YouTube videos or came in from Twitter.
Maybe I’m able to cross the 200’000 page views a year in 2021? I’ll continue regularly writing blog posts, that’s for sure.
At the beginning of the year, I wanted to reach 20k page views a month, which means 240k a year. I did not get this exact number, but I am delighted with the overall increase in readership.
One of my goals was to write at least one blog post per month. I’m glad I could stick to this goal in 2020 with a total of 20 blog posts.
I stopped cross-posting to dev.to as I did not get enough views from the platform anymore. It seems like the platform became that popular that the number of writers is a lot bigger than the number of readers. In the beginning, I saw a lot of potential for me on the platform.
By now, it seems like any other platform in the sense that you need to have a big following and many people upvoting and sharing your articles to give signals to the platform to promote your work to a broader audience.
YouTube
I started the year with around 600 subscribers and 30’000 views on my 11 published videos. By the end of the year, I had crossed the 4000 subscriber milestone, and my 22 published videos on my YouTube channel reached 148’000 views.
I am happy with the fact that I was able to double the number of videos in 2020. I wish I was able to upload even more videos, but as I explained in great detail in my two years on YouTube video, it takes a long time to create videos the way I do.
In most videos of 2020, I talk about C# language features. Those videos did not attract many viewers because the topic is very niche, and not many developers look for specific C# language features. In the future, I want to put more time into topic research to produce videos that attract a larger audience.
In July 2020, I got to 4000 watch hours in addition to the 1000 subscribers I reached a few months prior, I was allowed to apply for the YouTube Partner program. I got quickly accepted and started earning my first dollars through ads playing before and after my videos.
In conclusion, I’m happy with how the year turned out. Sure, I could have created more videos, and it would be great to have a bigger audience by now, but things are the way they are. I hope to break the 10’000 subscriber mark in 2021 with my YouTube channel.
Work
I’m still working remotely as a full-stack software engineer. While working on many 3D configurators in 2019, I was lucky to get into a more data-driven application development project in 2020.
I am very interested in working in the 3D world, but if it takes up too much time of my week, I feel unproductive and a little overwhelmed. And to be frank, I wouldn’t say I like it that much to do it every day.
I have been working on data-driven applications since 2006, and it is arguably the area of software development where I am very productive by now. And it is also a lot of fun to work on projects with changing requirements and rapidly moving technologies.
We use React in the front-end of our web applications. We almost exclusively use hooks and functional components. It took a few months to grasp the patterns fully, but in the end, I think it is a great way to build reusable components and maintainable applications.
We used to use Node in the backend mainly, but in 2020 we decided to write .NET backends again. In 2021, we’ll release our first product running on a .NET 5 ASP.NET backend. I’m glad because as much as I like TypeScript and JavaScript, I’m still a .NET developer by heart. If there were no .NET development going on anymore, I’d consider quitting my day job.
I am also involved in the continuous integration and continuous deployment of our applications. At the beginning of the year, I set up a pipeline for most of our products, and I learned a lot since then.
I worked four days a week (80%) for my employer, and I’ll continue to work 70% in 2021. Reducing my work hours will give me more room to create videos for my YouTube channel and write articles for this blog and pursue other projects in my leisure time.
Pandemic
This end-of-year review cannot be seriously taken if I wouldn’t mention the 2020 pandemic. In Switzerland, people started to hear about the pandemic early in the year. We saw horrible news from Italy, where a region was utterly cut off from the world to cope with the coronavirus outbreak.
Luckily, my area didn’t get hit too much in the first wave.
In March, the Swiss government decided to put us on lockdown. Every store that didn’t sell goods of daily use did have to close. It was about six weeks until the shops reopened.
That didn’t hit me because I usually order online anyway, and I am not a shopping person. But it was a weird feeling seeing all those closed stores. And I miss going to see football matches of my local team.
My work was also not affected as I work fully remote since November 2018. The company was lucky to keep most projects, and we were never in fear of losing projects.
What hit me more is that we could not meet people anymore, and we started to wear masks in various areas of our lives. While writing this article, our restaurants and bars are locked down again until the end of February 2021.
I’m looking forward to a time to meet people again, enjoy a beer in the lovely Swiss summer and regain certainty and stability. I enjoy being at home, but I’d like to travel again and share my experience with other people locally and all over the world.
Having said all that, I’m happy that I’m healthy and nobody in my family got seriously ill from the virus, and I wish everyone reading this all the best – stay safe, everyone.
Buying Our First Home
We haven’t planned to buy a property, but we bought our flat this year. The flat’s former owner wanted to sell it, and we got asked if we might want to buy it from him.
At first, we weren’t sure if we wanted to do that, and we also weren’t sure if we had enough financial power. It turned out we were able to buy it, and we did it.
If we did reject the offer, we most likely would have had to move out. Because we like the flat and its location my girlfriend and I decided to take on this adventure.
I’m still not feeling like a homeowner because I lived in this flat for more than five years as a renter and because it’s a flat and not a house. By now, I mainly see the financial benefits that come from owning versus renting. We’ll see how things turn out in the future.
Football & Back Injury
I’m still playing football (soccer for American readers) despite getting older and older. Meanwhile, I play in the lowest league in Switzerland. As the team captain, I try to help build a new team that will hopefully continue to exist when I eventually retire.
In March, I started feeling pain while sitting on my office chair. The pain increased, and by July, I couldn’t sit for longer periods, especially getting up from my chair was painful. I eventually had to visit a doctor.
I don’t want to go into too much detail, but the pain is still there and restricts a few activities. I could not ride my bike in 2020, and I still cannot sit for a longer period. I hope this issue will be gone in 2021.
In regards to football, it wasn’t a big issue because the spring season got canceled, and the autumn season eventually got cut short too.
It’s still fun playing a team sport, but I see my performance dropping every year. Recover after matches take longer, and my general fitness level hasn’t improved either. The canceled season hasn’t helped. 2021 could be my last year of competing if there will be a season at all (pandemic).
30th Birthday
In September, I turned 30. Last year, I thought about making a big party, but as you can think, there was no party at all due to the pandemic. It wasn’t that special of a day, but I still feel like I’m in my twenties, and it’s weird to state I’m older than 30.
I took the chance to reflect on my twenties, and I’m proud of what I achieved, and hopefully, I can accomplish a lot more in my thirties. I’m excited to see what’s coming in the next ten years.
Esports Organization
I started a small Esport organization in 2020. Our goal is to promote Counter-Strike on an amateur level locally and allow everyone to enjoy their games. There are many professional organizations but almost no amateur organizations.
I mention this in this blog because I was able to get a sponsorship for our Counter-Strike team for at least two years. It’s a personal win, and I’ll definitely look back in a few years. I’m looking forward to the next chapters of our journey.
Maybe I’ll work more on building this Esports organization after I retired from football. We’ll see.
Blazor Online Course
At the beginning of the year, I announced that I’m going to create a Blazor online course about Creating Web Applications with C#. It turned out that I took a lot more time than I thought and didn’t want to neglect my YouTube channel.
I had to decide if I was going to publish the online course and stopped creating YouTube videos for a few months or if I want to continue building my YouTube channel. I decided that I want to continue my YouTube journey and canceled the online course project.
I’m still working on a crash course, but it’ll be available for free on my YouTube channel. I realized that building an audience and making my content available to as many people as possible is more important to me than monetizing my content. At least in the current stage, this decision made the most sense to me.
At the beginning of the year, I said I wanted to grow my Twitter profile to 4000 followers by the end of 2020. It turned out I made it to 2400. It’s okay.
There were so many political topics in 2020 that I preferred staying away from Twitter for weeks to months. I still enjoy having one on one conversations, and I learn a lot about what happens in the tech world for my Twitter feed.
2020 was also the year of canceling people online, and I didn’t want to get into any controversial discussions. Especially for non-US people in tech, Twitter wasn’t comfortable in 2020.
Having said all that, I don’t pressure myself. I’ll continue to engage in conversations and share my articles and YouTube videos. Follow me, if you aren’t already.
Conclusion
The year 2020 had a lot to offer, and I’m looking forward to an exciting and hopefully prosperous 2021. I already have many ideas and projects in my backlog, but I’ll hold them back for now.
