nilsb.org – designer, developer working on the web.

2019 in retrospect

I'm constantly forgetting what happened in which year. Seriously! I can remember the weirdest, smallest details about my day to day work. Like new css features or how to patch an ethernet cable for example. But yesterday for example I was not sure any more if we bought our car this or last year.

To fix this I will try and write more! Maybe not necessarily blog more but at least dump thoughts and facts into some kind notebook. Probably iCloud notes :) But hey … don't judge me. It's easy and not that ugly anymore.

SO! What happened this year?

Both my Mom and Dad turned 60! My Mom had a big celebration in the Netherlands and my Dad was still working in Morocco and pretended the whole like nothing special happened haha. Typical.

We were skiing in Gastein, Austria in February. That was Louis' first time in the snow and he totally hated snow. My wife and I both love the mountains and were maybe hoping for a bit more enthusiasm but he was not even 2 years old. We'll try again in 2020.

Work wise, we went on our first offsite event as a new group wanting to start some kind of web dev and design conglomerate. Though I guess I can't even call it an "off-site" event since there's ususally not one site we're all at. We're in fact scattered pretty much all over Germany. If we had someone join from the south somewhere, we'd actually cover pretty much every corner of the republic.

One project that I'm proud of is smartfit Online Sizing. That started in 2018 already but really started taking off this year. The whole thing started with a prototype for my good friend Andreas who lives downstairs. His company Radlabor wanted to get busy on the internet too and do something about the horrific state bycycle ecommerce is in. Or in his words: "You know, the bike industry is rather behind technology wise compared to how far fashion ecommerce has come the last years."

We're in the process of rewriting the whole product in React which will hopefully spur many more possibilties and better integrations in ecommerce sites.

I gotta go finish installing new shelves in the basement but I hope to continue documenting projects! I for one hope to find the time and continuity :)

Happy new year everyone!