Goodbye, 2021!

Starting at dormakaba

I started this year with a new job, moving from a shareholder register to a company for access solutions. The first month was driven by a lot of explanations and testing. The main task at my new job is to write interfaces that connect our customers’ systems with our access control software. After legally being forced to work from home, I wrote a few interfaces.

During the year, I was able to convince my team of several optimizations in terms of architecture and took also the lead on them. Establishing a core library and building interface standards that just need configuration are those with the most positive impact. We also started to use Bitbucket (the company’s choice) internally, which is also one of my maintenance tasks now.

Overall, I am quite satisfied with my first year at dormakaba even if it was (and is) challenging due to the pandemic.

Side projects

In terms of my side projects, I had a slow year. I did some minor updates to my apps and eventually published them to the stores.

The main focus was put into TwistReader (a twitter list based newsreader), which isn’t available in stores yet.

Writing this application produced some libraries (partly public/open source, partly private only). My goal is to get the app into TestFlight in the beginning of 2022 and also to write about the libraries.

Blogging

I did not blog much this year. I covered some interesting (hopefully) topics, though:

• /extending-xamarin-forms-nuke-to-load-a-placeholder-for-images-that-fail-to-load/
• /workaround-to-force-xamarin-forms-webview-to-use-a-dark-mode-css-for-local-content-on-android/
• /workaround-to-force-xamarin-forms-webview-to-use-a-dark-mode-css-for-local-content-on-android/
• /fix-xcode-is-not-currently-installed-or-could-not-be-found-error-in-visual-studio-2019-for-mac/
• /dealing-with-the-system-ui-on-ios-in-xamarin-forms/
• /xfqad-compile-xaml-without-code-behind-in-xamarin-forms/
• /use-the-ios-system-colors-in-xamarin-forms/

As I mentioned above, I plan to write about the libraries and also some other stuff I did in Xamarin.Forms next year.

Private stuff

The non technical part of my year was a turbulent one. As I became non-smoker last December, I restarted the sports ambitions I lost when I was young.

I started with running, did some free runs in the beginning, continuing with training for 5 km in under 30 minutes (which I am no able to achieve constantly).

I also started to train for 10 km in under 60 minutes, but was not able to finish the training course yet. I will restart this course in 2022. If you’re into running/cycling as well, feel free to follow me on Strava.

Just running isn’t enough, however, and so I also started with regular functional strength workouts with Freeletics (follow me here).

In our family, things became different as now both of our kids are no longer at school but started to work in apprenticeship. It is amazing to see them both starting they career, even though they routes are different from what we as parents expected. I wish both of my kids the best and the strength they need to succeed.

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I wish all of you a Happy New Year, success, a lot of luck and strength for all the challenges of 2022.

Stay safe and healthy, everyone!

Title Image by Markéta Machová from Pixabay