First Half
The first half of the year I wasn’t much into development besides work. I was asked to help building a new German Android news site, which turned out to be an impossible task because of several reasons (high author fluctuation was the baddest thing). In the end, the owners decided to go another route by turning the side into a a site dedicated to Chinese hardware, which is an area I do not have a lot of trust and interest. So I decided to step out of the project and focus again on my software development efforts.
Back to software development (Second Half)
The first thing I was focusing on in that area was to get deeper into web development with ASP.NET Core. I learned a few basics from Pluralsight and started to work on a project that I will (hopefully) bring forward in 2018.
I also got back deeper into cross platform development with Xamarin, especially Xamarin.Forms. As Microsoft killed all mobile efforts in the UWP, this step was one I denied way too long to go. As a logic step I started with my ongoing series of blog posts about Xamarin Forms and the MVVMLight toolkit. If you missed it, here are the links to the posts:
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Xamarin Forms, the MVVMLight Toolkit and I: Dependecy Injection
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[Updated] Xamarin Forms, the MVVMLight Toolkit and I: navigation and modal pages
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Xamarin Forms, the MVVMLight Toolkit and I: showing dialog messages
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Xamarin Forms, the MVVMLight Toolkit and I: EventToCommandBehavior
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Xamarin Forms, the MVVMLight Toolkit and I: taking control over the back buttons
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Xamarin Forms, the MVVMLight Toolkit and I: loading bundled assets in the Forms project
During the first 8 month of the year, I was running Android as my daily driver. However, I never was really happy with the Android OS (and I am still not), so I decided to switch to the iPhone 8 Plus after its launch. I detailed the reasons why here:
In the last month, I was also looking into some IOT development, and this is were my current focus is. In the next few weeks I have a private project that overlaps with a project at work. I really appreciate it when I can be productive in multiple ways, and those (sadly rare) overlapping projects are just plain awesome to work on.
Private things…
Having a look at my private goals (for those who care), I started with some functional fitness workouts in late summer. I am using the workout app from Skimble, which has some handy video guides and is way cheaper than a gym subscription. In 2018, I want to move on to get even more fit. On top, one of the biggest (and probably hardest) goal is to become a non-smoker. I am hoping that being more active has motivating impacts on the later goal as well. On top, in the last few days I had my first baby steps into meditation as well, but I am still struggling with that one. So, way to go in these parts of my life.
Well, this post is not as long as the ones of the years before, but I really already told you everything that happened this year. To close this post, I wish you all a happy end of the year, an awesome party tonight and I hope to welcome you all again in 2018 here on my personal blog.
