Year Review: 2019

Another year has gone by. This time I think I'm ready to share my thoughts. This post will serve as an English exercise for me and as a progress report for all of you.

January:

Nothing too special here. I've revisited one of my projects from the 2018. Did a little code review, ensured everything was fine (for my past self) and froze the project yet again. At the end of the month I started looking into VK API. This topic was going to drive me forward for the rest of the year.

February:

I started working on a project called Hawk. Some of you may have heard about it. Initially this was nothing more than an experiment. Got some basic things to work, did some experimentation with UX/UI, learned new Flutter architecture pattern. Overall, this month was all about experiments.

March:

I had been spending more time working on Hawk. Got more things to work (real-time chat updates, push notifications with background execution, etc.), added more UI gimmicks. Nothing too special here.

April:

More work on Hawk. Refactoring, new features, prototype theme engine which is simply a wrapper around Flutter's built-in themes.

May:

A bit more new features for Hawk. Local media browser (with extensive use of platform channels), videos and… that's it. Also, I started a new paid project this month & got it to prototype stage fairly quickly.

June:

More work on both Hawk & that "paid project". Nothing too interesting here (except maybe more platform-related stuff for voice recording).

July:

Some random stuff here like working on that "paid project", tightening some loose ends in Hawk and reviewing 2018's project. This time I did not like what I saw at code review.

August:

Nothing interesting at all. Been on vacation then been trying to get back into work.

September:

Put a tiny bit of polish on that "paid project" & started a new [thing]. At this point Hawk is in "frozen" state, most of my time is dedicated to that thing I mentioned.

October:

That thing started as a technical preview for splash screen transition. Less than a month after initial prototype it evolved into basic VK music player (now known as VK X Lite). This time I thoroughly studied app architecture & made myself some constraints to keep my code clean & readable. Near the end of the month I returned to Hawk to fix a couple of issues and hell was that me who wrote that abomination?

November:

I've spent a lot of time perfecting & optimizing VK X Lite. I actually got it to the release stage! This month I did not risk returning to any of my older projects. One day I will have courage to bring them back from the dead, but that day is yet to come.

December:

I've put my soul into that Lite thing. It works right as I want it to. Its source is (mostly) perfect. Tried adding some experimental things like Web support and succeeded. What's left now is to make it perfect in all the ways possible. This'll take some time, but I think I'll get it done in ~1.5 months.

Footnotes:

All projects mentioned here are built with Flutter.

I have yet to decide on the fate of Hawk.

Neither Hawk nor "2018's project" suit my code quality requirements now.

Thanks to all who have been with me this year.

Remember: nothing is final.

Evolitist

December 21th, 2019