Another year has past, and as always, I’ll do a quick overview of what happened. I’ll also look at what will happen, making silly predictions and statements about what I will do in the next year. Predictions and statements that usually don’t come to fruition, because, well things happen and interests change.
2017
Peergroups
2017 was the year I helped launch Peergroups, a sister-project to Peerby. Both are part of the sharing economy. They allow you to make a request to lend something you need. Typical examples are a ladder, drill, scanner,… Usually objects someone owns but doesn’t use often. And then you need this object for a one-time usage. It would be silly to buy the object, because after using it once, you would probably store it somewhere for months if not years. It’s better for your wallet and the environment to be able to use it from someone else. And it allows you to get to know new people.
Peerby is a platform that allows for this, based on location. The idea is to lend objects from people in you neighborhood. Peergroups does the same, but based on a predefined group, usually your workplace, sports group, or any other organization you’re active in.
We’re currently still small, with 3 groups and about 280 users, but several other companies are interested and/or starting up.
Technically, this was a very interesting project for me. I used Orchard CMS and developed custom modules, using CQRS and Event Sourcing. I’m now looking into Xamarin to build an acommpanying mobile app.
Foodpairing
In 2016, I started at Foodpairing, a company that uses a scientific approach for combining tastes and textures, to create new tastes, and new products for the food industry.
I learnt NodeJS and Python here, and managed to get out of the Microsoft-centric world that one often encounters in the (Belgian) enterprise.
I also helped reduce the amount of legacy code (something I’m starting to specialize in) and increased performance of the core .NET application of the company.
Software development projects rarely finish, but with these two milestones achieved, I think I can say my work was done.
2018
TUI
This year will bring me back closer to home, working at TUI in Ostend. Again, it’s a refactoring project. I’ll probably be writing about some techniques we use later. Anonymized to protect the guilty of course.
HitSubscribe
At the end of 2017, I published an article on the SubMain blog, titled Commented Out Code Is Junk In Your Codebase. I did this via Erik Dietrich’s HitSubscribe.
In 2018, I hope to be able to publish more articles this way. It allows me to get paid for doing something I love (writing). Just like I can get paid for coding, which I also love.
Peergroups
For Peergroups.be, we should be able to release a mobile app this year, based on Xamarin. I already have a small prototype running. You’ll read more about it later.
Marathon
There, it’s out in the open. Unless my back-pain stops me, I should be running the Bruges marathon this year.
Happy 2018!
So those are the broad plans I’m making for 2018. But just like in any software development project, you can’t look forward too far. Circumstances will change, priorities will shift, new opportunities will arise.
I wish you all the best for 2018!