My 2018 Recap and 2019 Wishlist

2018 was a monumental personal development year for me. This year, I was proud of myself because I learned, practiced and achieved many goals. Now it’s time to look back.

My 2018 personal achievements:

1. For the first time, I was given the courtesy to architect and design a mobile application from scratch (its name is Blinky and it’s now live on the store (https://blinky.app/download), including choosing technology stack.

2. It was a React Native application, using redux as state management, redux-thunk for asynchronous action handling, react-navigation for navigating between screens and expo for fast development speed and their quality of the framework. I would love to thank the guys developed those libraries and frameworks for enabling me to fulfil my development needs and speed for my company.

3. I want to express my appreciation toward my old company where I was an intern at as well as an awesome mentor who helped me a lot. The model of their application inspired my plans for the Blinky mobile application that I am currently working on.

4. I was given the opportunity and responsibility to lead my own front-end team. It was a small team of only 3 juniors. Due to my extensive investment on improving front-end expertise and soft skills, I was able to gain my company’s trust to lead and help my teammates. We worked together to build great projects, such as the mobile application Blinky, Blinky’s web application (also on React, yay!), a micro-service in Typescript with Google Sheets API as the database :p. With the design team in our company, we were even able to deliver two complete versions of the app in 1 single year (with changes in UI and UX)

5. For the first time, I could represent my company by becoming a mentor in a large hackathon event (https://hanoi.hackjunction.com/partners/bankify). It was an amazing yet challenging experience. I had to endure two 17 hour flights yet stay there for such a short time (3 days). There, I presented our challenges to the hackers, helped them with questions, met new people and evaluated the hackers’ work. I was blown away by my own countrymen’s development, presentation, and business-oriented skills during the hackathon.

6. I nearly completed my bachelor thesis (https://github.com/jarvisluong/Bachelor-Thesis---Ethereum-Blockchain-in-social-finance-applications). It is about developing a smart contract and connect it to our own Blinky application. I was always curious how smart contracts work and how to develop one, but I was too lazy to learn. The thesis finally forced me to open the documentation and start reading and building a smart contract. It turns out that writing a thesis was not such a huge deal and if you really devote the time and energy, you can finish one pretty quickly (I’m not counting master and Ph.D. theses of course haha).

7. I was the first time able to finance my own trip on the holiday and I was really proud of it. I am spending this Christmas and New Year’s Eve to visit my girlfriend in Vancouver, Canada (I write this during the holiday). It was such a lovely, “foody” city (compared to Helsinki and Tampere where I live obviously) and I enjoyed every single moment here with my girlfriend :-)

My 2019 wish lists:

1. Visit one React Native conference where I can meet my own like-minded developers.
2. My own Blinky application will be adopted by our company’s partners nicely. It is always nice to see my own product being used by others.
3. Finance two travel holidays, one back to Vietnam and one to Toronto and Montreal (Canada).
4. Graduate as a bachelor!!!
5. Having decided a major for my master degree.
6. Having contributed a rather medium or large size pull request to an open-source project about react/react-native.
7. Having the opportunity to learn more about making the architecture the Blinky application’s backend to suit the business’ need.