2019 is the year I started working as a professional developer. After almost two years of drudging my way through learning to program from home while working a full-time job, I began my first official SE job back in January. This left some room to be more experimental with side projects.

I shipped two production apps in Crystal, Captionaire and Wyyrds. Crystal is an amazing language to work with because it’s extremely fast and the community is so small that you basically have to do everything without relying on dependencies. Plus, writing against a compiler makes you so much more aware of execution choices, which helps when you go back to interpreted languages.

2020 will be a year of working with practicality. What ideas have the capability for monetization? What will scale? I’ve been dabbling in Go to try to achieve speed with enough of an ecosystem to abstract upon common patterns. Technology aside, I hope to build something that truly matters, and maybe some consumers will agree with that sentiment.