Year in review

Keeping with the tradition of reviewing my year, let's have a look back at my 2017.

I visited Japan

My buddy Jamar had the bright idea to order plane tickets to Japan in December of last year for September of this year. Of course, I paid him back within the first four months of 2017. Anyhoo, we stayed for two weeks (my other buddy Oliver stayed for a week) and it was one of the best experiences of my life. Holy moly. I still have a LOT of footage to get through. I've been meaning to post about my trip for quite some time but 60GB+ is too much to go through…or maybe I'm just lazy. Here's a couple pics to whet your appetite:

📸Japanese money! 📸I finally understand the significance of 7-11 📸SQUAAAAAD! 📸Nighttime Marauders 📸The only train delay I experienced and it was for five minutes 📸Rainy day in Tokyo 📸I found a dope spot for us to take pics 📸Cloud seeker 📸Shrimp curry at Mt Fuji 📸24 hours? Crazy 📸One of many train station shots

I proposed and got married

During Easter I proposed to my longtime girlfriend and although we planned an semi-elaborate wedding, we decided to make it a small get-together. After all, we were financing things ourselves so it made the most sense. This was another great experience, especially because the weather leading up to and immediately after our wedding day was absolutely dreadful and cold. We took that as a sign of the universe approving our union.

📸Marriage in autumn

If you're interested in learning how we met, you can check out both her post1 and mine2.

I lost my job

The startup I was working for went out of business in November. This was a mere four days after my wedding. 🤬 Yeah I know, fun right? Christmas a month later too? Good grief! Studies show that money is one of the major reasons behind divorce so I guess my wife and I were lucky that this happened immediately. Even though job searching is immensely stressful (and annoying), having ample time to work on projects I reserved for nights and weekends has been a plus.

Let this be a lesson to you: if you work for a startup that's focused solely on B2B and they poo-poo the idea of B2C for additional revenue even though their big partners are moving slower than molasses, flee as soon as you can. That big partner can and will outlive your dinky startup.

Became more productive

This was a direct result of losing my job. Per my post about neglected projects3, I went through the list and either redesigned or sunset them. My sunset'd projects aren't 100% gone, just positioned in a way that I don't feel bad about seeing them. A great way to ensure that is to get your project(s) to a nice stopping point and leave yourself notes.

With those out of the way, I started work on a social network called Socii. You can read more about4 it or visit the site5 to sign up for updates!

FIN

Here's my top nine Instagram photos, based on likes.

📸Top nine Instagram pics of 2017

This may be the last time I do one of these, I want Socii to replace Instagram for me. 🕸