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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern

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How are you winding down your year?

Either personally or as a team, what's the vibe like as you wrap up 2019 and look forward to 2020?

Top comments (36)

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itsasine profile image
ItsASine (Kayla)

Heh, at work, it's certainly more on the side of having time to do side projects or administrative things rather than heavy feature work. Since our process involves a minimum of 4 people (dev, reviewer, QA, accepter) and there's only 3 in the office the rest of the month, the work we're taking on is super minimal (and our PM will have to remotely accept stuff).

At home, I'm balls to the wall trying to have a productive year-end. Planning out blog posts I'd like to do in 2020, buying Def Leppard tickets for my 28th birthday 🤘, checking calorie counts of all the holiday party wares, setting up a Notion environment (with the free student account) to keep track of ALL THE IDEAS, and playing the Fallout 76 holiday event.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

At home, I'm balls to the wall trying to have a productive year-end. Planning out blog posts I'd like to do in 2020, buying Def Leppard tickets for my 28th birthday 🤘, checking calorie counts of all the holiday party wares, setting up a Notion environment (with the free student account) to keep track of ALL THE IDEAS, and playing the Fallout 76 holiday event.

Same energy I'm closing the year with 😄

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andevr profile image
drew

How is fallout 76 post fallout?

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kyleboe profile image
Kyle Boe

Saved up some PTO and am taking a nice long 2 week break starting this Friday. Going to go to the Oregon coast for a bit and do some camping.

I try to keep the end of the year as a time to rest and assess the past year and make goals for the year ahead.

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thewasif profile image
Muhammad Wasif • Edited

2019 was great. I learned a skill, which I'm gonna use my entire life. ReactJS!
Stepping towards cloud native by learning Kubernetes
I've also learned Docker
Doing all this, because one day, I want to be like you @ben . A founder!

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nomangul profile image
Noman Gul

Keep it up buddy 🙂

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shiling profile image
Shi Ling

I like to take this slower time of the year to do spring cleaning on documentation 🙂

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

I've been wanting to use the phrase "spring cleaning" in a similar way but felt like it wasn't the right phrase 😄

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hantu0 profile image
Tim

"Housekeeping" may be a serviceable term.

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shiling profile image
Shi Ling

Ah, spring cleaning has been a ritual for me every December since young, so the phrase came naturally. Though these days I sometimes use the phrase "Marie Kondo-ing" my code / documentation / etc. :D

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femi_dd profile image
/ • Edited

So I decided to complete some courses on FreeCodeCamp and so far it's been fun. I recently completed the API and Microservices section and got my certificate on it, right now I'm on the Javascript Algorithm and Data Structures course, and it's really been fun so far for me.

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Michel Renaud

At work, still fighting the good fight trying to get DataTables (see datatables.net) column filters working the way we want (we have a more complicated use case than usual). I thought I was done yesterday, then found one field that doesn’t work for some reason. I was almost hoping to die in my sleep so I wouldn’t have to deal with it. :) Just 6 days of work left before I take some time off until after my birthday in January.

At home, trying to get into Vue.js, but so far it’s been more of a war with tooling than being able to toy with Vue.js. Visual Studio 2019, VS Code, Webstorm, all giving me various levels of grief.

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Nick Schwaderer

Easing up on the 'paid coding' workload, and I'm starting to refocus on the love and joy of coding and community.

That means revamping PastRubies ( pastrubies.com ), having a crack at AdventOfCode, and also trying out fun resources like destroyallsoftware.com , upcase.com and codility.com to reinvigorate the love of coding! 🥰

There were a couple months this year where I feel that I let the pendulum swing the other way - where coding and creating started to feel like just a "job" and a "source of income". So I'm personally enjoying refocusing on the love of the craft again. ❤️

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femi_dd profile image
/ • Edited

it's a great way to start, but not for someone new to the API and Microservices keyword or technology, there are no explanations on what Microservices or APIs are. I would advise a person to read up a few things on API and Microservices before taking the course just to get some theoretical idea on what it's about. FreeCodeCamp is a great resource nevertheless.

So personally, it's great because I checked out the meaning of these keywords, saw some tutorials and wrote a couple of things myself

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AxelleDRouge

Ah with a perfect timing I am ending a project and starting a new one with a full tech ReactJS. No more working on code legacy, I'm starting from scratch, without stupid history that I must follow because... a really new project to build.

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drew

As far as vibe, for me its keep on trucking. I've been learning Java so continuing with that, hoping to get through the main parts of the course I'm doing in the next couple months. As far as my job goes, I probably won't see home until next year, but I'm just keeping my head up. I plan to be job searching by no later than June.

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Kim

Trying to plan out what I want to focus on in 2020 for my personal/career development space, what technologies/languages/tools I need to position my career in a good spot.

Resting as much as I can as well, since I was hit with food poisoning and then a cold that won't leave!

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Peter Witham

For the projects I work on and my team, it's all about getting as many things cleared out as possible. Any loose ends that we never tied up. Any little bugs or features that we can take a little time to look at that are low impact.

Then, recover ready for next year :)

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Mike Healy

The vibe is very frustrated. Project(s) I'd queued up for the quiet period did not kick off in time, and it's left me in the lurch.

Getting anything new going at this time is difficult, because there's no urgency.

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Kamran Ayub

Finishing up a course on contributing to open source this week! ✨ It's been about 120 hours of work so far since mid-October so I'm excited to wrap it up and share it. Next week we'll be visiting family in South Dakota and I'll be catching up on some games: Outer Worlds, Breath of the Wild, and Halo: Reach! 🎮

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Luke Inglis

No hope of actually winding down for me; My wife and I are on baby watch expecting our third child...

That said I'm finally joining the rest of the web dev world and learning some React.