With this blog post I want to recap my year 2018 and find a personal resume – partly for me as I have to know where I am standing and what this year brought for me but also for the readers of this blog of course. I also want to see what I can improve for the next year and, well, maybe I can really improve some things. I will try, for sure!

Work

Offering Solutions Software

It has been quite a while now (2016) since I have founded my company “Offering Solutions Software” which I provide ASP.NET Core and Angular consulting and development with. In the beginning it was a “side project” which I was running beside my everyday work. In the meantime it became my full time job and I think this year I stabilized it a bit and could gather a lot of experiences with running your own company on your own. The amount of work you put in is massive, especially when you do a lot of community stuff beside (which I will mention later). You are responsible for everything that you do from the book keeping over the insurances to how you treat your customers, making acquisitions, managing your time like, negotiating contracts and so on. (Not that I did not know that when I started. But the way you expect it to be and the way it is in the end differs mostly. Which is not a bad thing. :) However it is a lot of fun, too! There are a lot of parts where you gain some freedom in decisions. For me this is important especially if it comes to questions on “Can I attend this conference?”, “Can I take a day off to build up some skills in xyz” or “Can I give this course/workshop instead of developing at a customer?” This freedom is kind of satisfying but again: You always have to find the right balance. Kind of balancing those things is what I learned this year but have to improve in the future for sure!

As a side project I started the Developer Academy which I want to provide courses with. This platform was raising in the middle of the year but I want to improve it during 2019. There is no pressure on that which I enjoy but I want to bring courses, knowledge to people and run workshops independently.

Egghead.io

I checked my mails and in the beginning of 2018 I became an egghead instructor. Wow, that was one year ago in January. Phew, time passes. However: I LOVE doing video courses and egghead provides me a platform where I can do small online courses with hitting-the-nail-topics if I got a brainfart again. Thats cool. I mean, there is a lot of preparation still, but it is not as much effort like a 3.5 hour course which I did for packt/udemy last year. So this is kind of nice.

Check out my courses here: courses

Google Developer Expert

A big thing this year for me was becoming a Google Developer Expert in Web Development and Angular. This is stunning, absolutely amazing. I am so proud of being part of this really really amazing community. I do not want to spend much time on this otherwise than thank all the people who have been involved in this. I really enjoy this community and think it is the best in the world. I owe this community a lot.

Microsoft MVP

Beside the GDE which I got for the first time I have been awarded as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for the fourth time in a row. Again: I could not be happier about this. This is amazing. Again this community thing became a big thing in my life. I managed to get my job in a way I can push community as far as I can.

With all my heart, body and soul I truly believe that the community part is one of the best things ever happened to my life, either its the GDE or MVP Program, UserGroups or discussions. It’s the best thing about my job.

Pluralsight

Another thing which I did not mention so far and want to mention briefly here is that I became a Pluralsight author. This is a thing where a dream came true for me. Currently I am working on my first course and will let you guys know if there is something to see. A blog post will follow then. I think if there is no value yet, there is no reason to celebrate. :)

Community

I mentioned the community already but want to point out the activities I did in 2018 and the things I have been involved in.

.NET Day 2018

At May 29th Manuel Meyer and I hosted the .NET Day 2018 supported by a big team of helpers and volunteers. It was a great success as we got a lot of good and constructive feedback. The point on this – and this is why I am also very proud of it – is that it is a community conference. This means that everything (!) we earned (and I do not only mean financial things but also provided help from others, connections, feedback, experiences, …) returns to the swiss developer community. What does that mean? Suddenly we were able to buy things like small stickers or having other speakers as usual which brought variety into the user groups, having some food for the user groups here and there and where able to host some events like the .NET Conf local which we also did this year. We were able to think a little little bit bigger. I think the people attending know this and felt this during the events. But also there is nothing achieved so far. The biggest part of what we have is going to flow in the .NET Day 2019 where community is again the basic idea behind. Check .NET Day Homepage for more info. Further announcement will follow.

SwissAngular

Damien Bowden and I started SwissAngular as a weekly newsletter and this year we where able – of course only with the help of other community interested people like Thomas Gassmann and Manuel Meyer – to organize the first two SwissAngular Meetups. We built a new UG SwissAngular Meetup! So if you are interested in providing a talk we are very interested. The meetups were really well attended which shows that there is a lot of interest in Angular in Switzerland. We hear you guys. We are trying to evolve this thing in 2019.

.NET UserGroup

With an amazing team behind the .NET User Group Zürich we managed to provide a lot of meetups during this ear. I think we nearly had every month except the summer break. I am also very proud of the team. There is a lot of work behind this but everybody is working with enthusiasm and motivation. Thank you for letting me be part of this guys :) Again: If you want to speak, let us know.

Conferences, Talks and Articles

I have been to a lot of conferences this year, including the BASTA! or the Angular Days in Germany in Berlin and also gave a talk the the WebZurich Video Youtube about “Real Time web applications with Angular and ASP.NET Core SignalR” or maybe the “Cross-Plattform-Entwicklung mit Angular, Cordova und Electron” talk in german which I gave at the BASTA! in Frankfurt here. All my talks and slides are always provided on Speakerdeck. The Windows Developer Magazine in Germany also printed one of my articles, you can read it here (german) Mit ASP.NET Core und Angular eine Webanwendung erstellen

Personal

Now comes the personal part. I normally do not let influence personal things into my blog but I thought a year recap would not be complete without a personal part as well. I will keep it small and short.

I got engaged! In May on a holiday in Barcelona I asked my girlfriend if she wants to become my wife and luckily she said yes. I am very happy about this and this leads me to the next thing which is my wedding this year. The celebration will be very minimalistic with only a few guests. Due to my family background for me this is a huge huge thing.

Further I bought a flat in Switzerland. This was exciting, I can tell you. However, I am a flat owner right now :) We moved in in November so everything is kind of fresh and new and we do not have all the furniture we want and stuff, but this will evolve over the time I think…or hope :)

Next personal thing is that I will become an uncle in 2019! Haha, let us see how that turns out, but I am also really looking forward to this.

2019

Many things have been going on in 2018. However in 2019 I want to get a better structure on the things I work on. I do already know how to structure my work but it does not feel like the golden path, you know? I tweeted about this:

If you have any suggestions: Let me know. I think I will blog about this, once I have found a better solution than a todo list which I am currently putting my brain farts on and work over them. I would like to plan, prioritize and track it. Have many ideas, but, like I said: Will maybe blog about this ;)

Next thing is work life balance. I do not believe in this because if you work with things you love there is no need for finding a balance which implies like working 8 hours and doing something else 8 hours to “balance it out”. (Do not let us start a discussion about this here) but however: I would like to find a way to get some distance to coding, teaching, speaking, consulting etc. so what I do in my everyday job and hobby. I love what I am doing, I do not want to get rid of this, but I want to give myself time to do something else completely not related to this. Maybe start bowling again where I can like refresh my head and always notice that I thought of nothing else than my movement during a game. I started reading more books which are not work related. Funny ones, things which make me laugh and where I look forward to read it. I have found such a book right now and if I have finished it I will search for the next one immediately. I like this one to two hours off a day before going to sleep. This is a thing I want to do more in 2019.

Looking back I am nothing more than thankful to everyone involved in this journey. Directly or indirectly. There have been many people involved. Some of them know, some of them do not. Thank to all of you. I am trying to give everything back I can, and I’ve got a whole year left to do it.

Thanks for reading and a great 2019.

Fabian