2020 Year in Review

I will admit, this is being written some time after the end of 2020. What is there to write about the most written-about year of our lives?

Arrows, my main professional project nowadays, was simply a twinkle in our eye in my 2019 Year In Review. In 2020 we turned that idea into in-depth customer research, a clearly defined target market, an MVP product, and a few hundred dollars of monthly recurring revenue by the end of 2020. And we’re still going strong in 2021. We have a (nearly) monthly set of advisor updates you can read here that track this progress. We also started a short (< 15 minutes) weekly podcast discussing our progress.

Not only that, but we also tackled a large amount of client work in Q2 for some very cool clients, including a couple projects for Snapchat. We also grew our project management skills, bringing on and managing more subcontractors than we have in the past. Sharpened skills all around.

2020 also marks the year where I think I can officially identify as a web/Rails developer. My frontend skills are still a little lagging, but overall my confidence in building for the web has burgeoned. If you put me on any Rails project I’m confident I could build great things on it. I’ve had several shifts in developer identity (student Java programmer -> iOS developer -> Unity/games programmer -> web developer) and this latest one has been fun as well. The power to quickly and easily build software on the web feels extraordinarily powerful, and I’m super excited to have it in my toolkit (especially as a tool for building businesses).

So that, briefly, was 2020. As I’m already a bit into 2021 I can tell you things feel like they’re on a somewhat steady trajectory of improvement. I’m already enjoying it, and can’t wait to see where I’m at by the end of this year!