2017 has finished, it’s time to summarise the last 12 month in my life.
The 2016 year finished with an epic failure. I had planned a holiday and booked flights to Russia for January. Two weeks before the flight I discovered that my russian passport had expired and that I wouldn’t have been able to leave Russia with expired passport. And it would have taken 3 months to get a new one. After checking all of the possibilities I decided to cancel the holidays.
To entertain myself over the 2016 Christmas break I’ve decided to build my own chair. And not just any chair but zero gravity chair. It’s a most comfortable chair by definition, a chair in which you don’t feel the weight of your body, like in zero gravity. In short after spending couple of days, buying wood, saw mill, chizzle and a lot of other tools, I’ve built my own chair. I’ve used it over the year many times and still using and should say I haven’t tried more comfortable chair than this one. And the total cost of tools and materials to day is $350.
In the first three month of 2017 I worked on a new business idea. It was called Ride Next Door. It was a service that married a taxi and a bus. It’s a shuttle bus for commuters. If you live in America it’s a clone of Chariot bus service. The highlight of this period I’ve solely built and launched the full technology for the business in 3 months. I’ve never heard that idea nor I’ve worked with those people before. I’m still impressed with the results to this day. I’ve build mobile application which allowed to buy tickets and track bus on the map in real time. Driver interface to manage passengers and admin interface to link all of the services together. After one month of trial it was decided to stop the project.
During that period in my spare time I volunteered in Ruby Australia. The first three months I cleaned and centralized all of the internal information in the organisation. The organisation up until that point had been running for 5 years. During that time it had many waves of volunteers that had begun many initiatives that were never finished. This resulted in a huge mess in documentation across multiple places. It took me a loooot of time to merge and centralise it. Unfortunately there are not many people (if any) who can appreciate the amount of work contributed. That’s simply because each person saw a small portion of it while I had to overlook everything.
On March 16th 2017 Ruby Down Under forum was launched. That was my initiative and I was driving it. When I started in RubyAU, I had different goal to unite and make australian Ruby community world famous. But I’ve realised that it is completely disorganised and lacked the foundation that a good community is built on. The forum could be that foundation. I’m saying could be, because it hasn’t happened yet. Not many people see or care about that yet. For now I’ve planted the seed and waiting when the time is right. I have fallen in love with forums again. I’m looking forward to using forum for work communication one day.
In April I’ve had a road trip from Hobart through tasmania to Melbourne in a van with my friend Emillio. That was amazing and I can’t describe how much I loved it. Tasmania is one of the most beautiful places and can’t wait to visit it again. The best plan is not to have the detailed plan, but only an outline. You can fill the details on the spot.
Also in February and April I went to Okean Elzy and Lindsey Stirling concerts. At the second concert I was wearing earplugs because it was very loud. When the concert started the sound was horrible. All you can hear is bass, it was overwhelming the rest of the instruments. I was so disappointed, so I decided to remove earplugs and realised that my earplugs were filtering out high frequency sounds. The concert was saved and I enjoyed it. Those were special earplugs which are designed specifically for that and that’s first time I’ve seen them in action.
In May I spent a few weeks in Darwin for part time holidays and RailsCamp. Later in May I volunteered at Rails Girls event where I met many great people.
In June right before an upcoming trip I decided to make a copy of my backup. That became the biggest failure of the year as I wiped the hard drive with data not the one I’ve just bought. A few milliseconds mistake costed my many days and weeks in data recovery over the rest of the year. I manage to recover most of what I needed and learnt a great deal about recovery process along the way.
Also around June I started a project which later got adopted by RubyAU to print personalised name tags at the events.
In July I went to Russia for a month. It was a majestic break from Melbourne winter. It’s always good to catch up with family and roller skate with my brother. He also introduced me to the local motorcycle group. We did a lot of motorcycle gymkhana together, was a great time. I really like small communities, they are much better than big ones because you do not spread yourself too thin when meet new people.
I was glad to return to winter because I had big plans to practice snowboarding as the Australian ski season was still on. Overall I think I had 5 or 6 day trips to the mountains. I’ve bought my own snowboard and equipment. I have big plans for the upcoming 2018 ski season.
In November a good friend from Brisbane visited me. It was great to hangout with it and go for a road trip before another RailsCamp.
December highlights are road trips to farms, like strawberry, berry and cherry farms. Every single one of them was so amazing you’d think you can’t match it. And yet every new one is just as good.
The end of the year was celebrated with road trip to Point Nepean on 31th. What was planned as a short trip ended up being 14 hours long. Spontaneously we’ve decided to see New Year fireworks from Albert Park. We’ve arrived there 23:45, got a car park very quickly and with 1 minute walk we had one of the best spots in Melbourne to watch fireworks. I still think that we got very lucky.
I’ve made good friends this year and we had of lot of fun time together.
2017 was a great year and looking back I’m surprised to see how many big things have happened, because it doesn’t feel like that every day.