What I’ve learned 2014

I learned a lot in 2014. I learned from failure and some great experiences. One of those great experiences was eurucamp 2014 (read about it here). The ruby community and people i met there are terrific. It was good for me to be with like-minded people who do a similar thing like me. I’ve never had this before.


Also was my first hackathon back in june a great experience. I want to participate in more hackathons in 2015. It was very nice to see the spirit of people and what we all accomplished in just a short time. It is so important to talk to people who do similar things like me. Also it is important to have a good mentor, a person whom you can learn from. I’ve never had this, but thanks to the eurucamp and hackathon I now see the sense in it. So I decided to start a coderdojo in Greifswald in 2015, to teach kids how to code.

Another thing what I learned was you should broaden your horizon for new technologies and frameworks. I got a little deeper in Javascript, but there is still so much to learn and new things spread out every week. You can’t learn them all, but I want to learn more about other languages and frameworks to be able to decide if another technology suits better the needs of a project.

I had some customer projects this year, too and not all went well. I coded a facebook app with rails. I was excited about to code this app, but developing a canvas app for facebook sucks. I had massive problems with the sign in process and third party cookies, but more of it in another post. In another project I can’t make any progress because even the customer really doesn’t know what he wants. How can I code something if I don’t know what it is supposed to be? If I guess I’m possibly wrong and have to start again. Another thing what disturbed me was a long communication way with the customer in a project. I never spoke with the customer directly, only through a third party and that is awful. If I had a question, I asked the third party, the third party asked the customer and maybe I got an answer one week later. It all would be faster with direct communication. So I learned dircect communication is allways better and waiting for feedback sucks.

This was my year 2014. I hope I learn some new technologies next year, like angular and ember. I want to participate in more hackathons. I like to be a part of eurucamp and baruco 2015. Have a nice year everyone.

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