What I've achieved in 2016

Last year, I decided to look back1 on everything I've learned/achieved and it was a great reflective experience. So, here it is again for 2016!

Became a father to a newborn

I was already a dad but I've never experienced taking care of a brand new life. I was worried that my son wouldn't like me and other silly non-sensical things like that. In reality, it is super challenging at times but he's a happy boy who has no problem falling asleep in my arms. And biting me. And farting on me. Needless to say, he's super comfortable with his papa. 😁

📸Ian Asher and I

Moved all my projects to GitLab

After running my own email server for half a year, I wondered why I was still paying GitHub for private repos. What they c̶h̶a̶r̶g̶e̶d̶ used to charge didn't make sense so I set up a personal GitLab instance2 and I couldn't be happier. I have unlimited private repos for $40/month (my server has 4GB of RAM and 60GB of storage). Because you can never be too sure, I have backups enabled for $8/month.

Moved all my email to Mail-in-a-Box

Just like with GitHub, I didn't understand why I was paying Hover $200/year for hosting my email when I already had a Mail-in-a-Box3 instance hosting one4 of my them. Thankfully, it's relatively easy5 to add multiple domains to the same box. It currently costs me $10/month for unlimited email accounts versus $200/year for merely 10 (my server has 1GB of RAM and 30GB of storage).

Released a SaaS product

I buy a lot of books on Amazon and never get around to reading them. That wasn't the case with The 7 Day Startup6. After reading the book (it was a quick read), I was super motivated to bring an idea (I sat on for about a year) to life. That idea was BeachfrontDigital7, a domain portfolio management tool. My market focus is quite niche, it's for people who buy multiple domains from multiple registrars. The problem I am solving involves keeping track of all your domains and renewal dates. Some TLDs also renew 30 days before expiration and I intend to include this kind of information in V2. I've gotten some great feedback and I look forward to enhancing the service in 2017.

Related to releasing BeachfrontDigital, I learned how to use Feathers.js8 more, used MongoDB9 and mongoose10 for the first time, and in production (I love them both now), and other back-end web development things. I'm a firm believer that side projects are key to learning new things. Your day job most likely won't challenge you to try drastically different things from what you're used to, which can stifle your personal growth.

Hosted my first pop-up shop

My clothing brand WEÖM11 had a pop-up shop in one of WeWork South Station's conference rooms. Along with my friend Angel12, we had fun collaborating on 2017 collections when we weren't chatting with people who stopped by. It was a great learning experience! In the time since, I've decided to transition/rebrand WEÖM to become a space-centric lifestyle brand instead of being just a clothing brand. There's still a lot of work to be done, but look forward to visiting the new world I'm building around it!

📸Bridget rocking the signature snapback

Had my first interview

Revision Path13 is a weekly interview podcast, Patreon14, and Slack group15 that I've been a fan of for quite some time. The host, Maurice Cherry16, likes to interview people on the come up doing interesting things. So, imagine my surprise when he asked to interview me! We tried recording while I was in my apartment but houses in Massachusetts are old so my microphone was picking AM radio signals. 😒 I wasn't hearing that weirdness but Maurice is in Atlanta and was hearing ads for Harvard, lol! Long story short, we had to reschedule and the interview will be out in January. Great way to start off the new year!

Published my first module to npm

My module is called hexo-render-sass and I made it before realizing that similar modules exist…oh well (it doesn't help that the official Hexo site17 fails to list Sass plugins on the site). It was another great learning experience and it took away the mystic mumbo jumbo I associated npm modules with. You can find it here18.

And that's it!

I'll end this post with my best nine Instagram photos of 2016, according to Lip Inc19. 🕸

📸My best 9 Instagram photos of 2016