2018 has come to an end and so it's time to take a minute to think about the last 12 months greatest achievements from personal and developer's perspective.

Last semester exams

When a new year starts, students in Germany usually have to start preparing for their semester exams. That's exactly how 2018 started for me but this year was different: I knew those exams were the last ones! After three semesters of studying Computer Science at Master's program I was proud that I've got all credit points from exams I need for my Master's degree in February - my only task from now on was to get a topic for my Master's thesis.

Master's thesis

In April I've finally got a topic for my Master's thesis: "Development of a git-based Open Access Journal System". Task is to develop a GitHub-like web platform to manage, version and share scientific papers. I've called it Paperfy. It is enriched by an advanced Markdown-based editor to write papers which supports dynamically generated diagrams based on external data sources. I like this topic a lot because I can apply all my knowledge about building web applications with Spring Framework and Vue.js.

SimpleSell launched

While studying I was working on SimpleSell, a shipping solution for smaller online merchants. Since the software is used in my parent's company we decided to release it as SaaS so other merchants can use it, too. So I've spent a lot of time after my exams on getting SimpleSell ready for launch at March, 15th. My main goal was to release a first version where I could get customer's feedback to extend and improve it. In July I've finally founded SimpleSell UG (haftungsbeschränkt), the company behind SimpleSell to get things official. It was really exciting to get into all those organizational things required to start one's own company.

Open source work

End of March I've released my first two open source PHP packages on GitHub, skollro/otherwise and skollro/factory. Otherwise is a package to create functional when-otherwise conditionals for more elegant code. Factory provides a declarative higher order syntax for implementing the factory pattern. At beginning of December I've published another package skollro/alexa-php-sdk which is an expressive SDK for developing Amazon Alexa skills in PHP.

Leaving is hard

In August I've left my student apartment in beautiful Passau. It was my first own flat and I've been living there for five years. It was hard for me to say goodbye but I didn't need the apartment any longer since writing a thesis doesn't require full attendance and can be done remotely most of the time. At the same time I had the chance to set up a small office room in my parent's house from where I can work when I'm home.

Goals for 2019

• Finish thesis and get my Master's degree in Computer Science
• Growing SimpleSell in every possible direction (technical and economical)
• Write more technical blog posts (I often put code snippets on Twitter if I don't have time to write in-depth about it, so follow me @skollro)
• Work on new and interesting projects
• Enough time for trying out fancy technical devices and coding crazy stuff