Back to writing (part 2)

Hello friends!

First of January today; the start of a hopefully happy new year. I wish you all the very best for a new year full of beautiful experiences and good moments. Wish lots of health for you and your loved ones!

So today I continue from where I last left: back to writing! (my wedding)

I was happy to be back to writing and explained where I've been for the past four months.

My wedding obviously was one big highlight of those last few months.

What else have you done?

Other than that, I've been really busy starting a new life.

I left my full-time job

What!? Really? Leaving a well paid full-time job now? In the middle of a crisis! Who does that?

That's initially most people's reaction. I've had to listen to it from everyone again and again.

But guess what? When you have a plan and know what you're doing, it doesn't matter when and how you do it.

I left a job that many people would only dream of having. But guess what? To each their vision. To each their dreams, inspirations and aspirations, and to each their limit. To me, I've been raised to always believe that sky's the limit...

Any way to not drag too much on this topic today, I'll be dedicating few posts about the topic. Most importantly I'll explain why you should never work for a big consultancy, and why it's very important you never hire a big consultancy (if you're any serious about your work and projects).

I worked on a couple cool projects

One of the projects I've been most passionate about in the last couple of years is Somerton Sporting Club. I've had some fun time working on MySomerton implementing some new features and improving the product.

With my friend Tarek, I enjoyed designing and developing a multilingual website for CDS MEA (Dubai based kitchen consultants).

I worked a lot on Reach Digitalworks

Reach Digitalworks is the latest project I've been collaborating on. We're now a cool small team of like-minded people, each expert in their field. We offer end-to-end digital services (everything from design and development to AI solutions and business intelligence, passing by digital marketing and digital strategy).

Check us out! Follow us on all major social media channels if you can!

Look out for our new website. It should be coming next week.

I left London!

After 7 years, I had to leave London.

With the current situation, more and more people are fleeing big cities. I was one of those. It really doesn't make sense anymore to stay in big/busy/polluted/expensive cities if you can work from home. That's one good thing that came out of lockdowns: more and more companies have realized that teams and individuals can be as efficient (if not more) when working from home.

With my wife, we started thinking about leaving the big city and immediately acted upon it!

We just gave our notice from our London flat and had a month to think about everything and sort it all out (it wasn't that easy though, we ended up having some complications. Never trust London property agencies!).

We moved to Poland

It's been almost 2 months since we're now in Poland. That's been one of the best decisions!

If you're a freelancer or planning to be one, you need to live in a cheap country! This makes things so much easier. Not having to worry about next month's crazy rent... It's just great.

Now Poland is ultimately not the final destination, nor have we ever planned before to one day be living in Poland. But it works for now. Moving here has been fairly easy (the easiest and best option we had).

Not thinking yet of where we'll be next, but some 🍹 somewhere under the 🌞 wouldn't be that bad 😇

For now, Poland is perfect. The best part is I now have my dedicated home office and can focus on my work and projects as much as I want 🧙‍♂️

I learned new technologies

I finally had time to focus on the technologies I'm most excited about. That's something that would have never been possible in my full-time job. 

I learned Gridsome and Nuxt! I focused a lot on the Jamstack 😊

Not sure what these technologies are? Well if you know me and know my take on technology, you'd probably expect they'd be super simple technologies that focus on a great developer experience and allow getting the job done (well, simply, and quickly).

For me, good technology is a technology that doesn't get in the way!

After all, are we here to build products and solve problems? Or are we better wasting our time and that of others on complicated and complex technologies?

I built a static site generator

As part of my work on Reach's new website, I ended up building my own static site generator from scratch 👀

If you've had a look at Gridsome (mentioned above) you'd know that Gridsome is a static site generator. It's not just a static site generator, it's a great static site generator!

So why building my own from scratch?

Reach's CEO (another link to our website, for you to check out if you still haven't 😉😉) has some good coding skills but without being a developer. His skills are limited to traditional HTML/CSS/JS. So what do I do? I try to show him Gridsome (how simple it is and all the benefits), it doesn't work so guess what? I build my very own static site generator from scratch. I take everything I like about Gridsome and implement it myself all while adapting it to our needs (and staying away from any modern JS frameworks).

✔️ job done

✔️ I learned a lot while doing it

That's just perfect. 

Note: to any developer out there, never reinvent the wheel! Better not to implement your own tools from scratch when they already exist! This was more for fun and was a learning experience more than anything else.

I built a static site generator built on top of a full-stack framework

Once you start building things from scratch, can you ever stop? 😅

That was super fun and actually super useful! I wrote some code that generates a static site from a fully dynamic website that's connected to a database 🤓

Note: if you're not too technical, apologies for having used 'static site generator' 7 times (8 times including this one). I should probably dedicate a blog post to static site generators (9 times 👷)

What else?

Well, I guess that's already quite a lot. That's mainly what I worked on and what I've been doing for the past 4 months.

What about you? What have you been doing? Did you make the best out of lockdowns?

Let me know in the comments box below 🖹🡇

Back to writing

The purpose of this whole post and the one before was to announce that I was back to writing.

If you enjoy my posts, please let me know as it's really what keeps me wanting to write. It's when I see that I can write something interesting and hopefully helpful for someone out there.

The plan is to start writing more frequently (once a week) and start writing more and more about technical stuff.

Cheers

As always until next time ✌

Take it easy! Keep moving! Stay Safe!

#makeTheBestOutOfThisNewYear #happyNewYear 🍻🎉🙌

Adios Royal Victoria - Until next time