2014

Continuing from my 2013 retrospective, here’s one for 2014.

In the beginning of the year, Florian and me moved into the A Color Bright office (which has been awesome). We continued working on Deckset, and launched Deckset in April. It’s been a really rewarding experience to have a product out, maintain it and have lots of happy users. We have some great plans for next year.

In May, we organized the second edition of UIKonf. It has been a blast, and except for one person, we only heard really nice feedback. I’m super happy that later in the year we decided to hand over UIKonf to a new team, and even more excited to be attending next year’s UIKonf without being an organizer.

In June, I went hiking with Pim in the Polish mountains. This was during WWDC, and there we heard about Swift. After coming home from my trip, it was very clear to me that we had to write a book on Functional Programming in Swift. We put up a website, started writing, planning and selling pre-access. We’re very happy with how the book turned out, and this is reflected by both the sales and feedback from our readers.

We kept on putting out monthly issues of objc.io, and starting creating weekly functional snippets. This still takes quite a bit of effort, but we have smoothened the process. There has been another big batch of awesome authors who wrote some great stuff. It’s a really rewarding project. Because of objc.io and the book, I’ve been speaking a lot last year. It’s been awesome to travel so much and meet so many nice people all over the world. Some of my favorite places from last year were Istanbul, Poland and Minsk. I’ve been to only one conference where I wasn’t involved as an organizer or speaker, and that was Makerland, which was really, really awesome.

I’ve been to the USA twice this year. In fact, I’m writing this from New York, where I’m staying for 6 weeks this winter. I really like the city, although I do miss Berlin quite a bit! In the summer I spent another 4 weeks all over the country, in New York, Boulder, Denver, San Francisco and more New York. I fell in love with Boulder and its mountains. In NY, I met many great new people. Two weeks ago, together with Brandon I organized the Functional Swift Conference, which was a great success.

There has been some solid running in 2014: I’ve hit the 2000km mark early December. My favorite running spots were the Alps and the Rockies, where I would wake up, run up a mountain, eat lunch, run back down and then write. I also ran my first real marathon, which didn’t really go as well as I wanted. Directly after that, I started training with Mark as my coach, and he made an awesome schedule on the way to the Rotterdam Marathon in April 2015.

Work-wise, we spent the last months finishing details on the print version of our book, maintaining Deckset and objc.io, but also have put in a lot of work creating our new app. It’s going to be another Mac app, and we hope to be ready in early 2015. I expect this to save people a lot of time, maybe even more so than Deckset. Once we ship it, I’ve achieved one of my goals originally set for 2012: have three products out there. Only late by a few years.

Thanks to all the awesome people who made this year so great. ❤