2020 in review

One of the things I really enjoy about the Christmas break, is how much it contributes to looking at things with perspective. It may be the copious amounts of food, the change in schedule, the time to think…

Whatever the reason, it really helps assessing how things have gone and where to go next. On this post I’ll be focusing on the former. 

Looking back at the roadmap for 2020 I published last year, there were 3 major milestones I was planning for 2020. Here’s the end of the year summary:

  • NewsWave onboarding redesign: improving the onboarding experience to make it seamless without loosing any user features. 
    • In January, the 2020.1 update completely overhauled the onboarding user experience. It effectively made it frictionless through a combination of server-side and app changes. 
  • NewsWave for Mac: releasing a fully featured Mac-native version of NewsWave. 
    • After several months of development, NewsWave for Mac was launched in May 26th. Since then, it has had multiple updates to improve the experience and further refine it based on customer feedback. 
  • Excelling: update its codebase to leverage newer technologies introduced since its launch. 
    • Shortly after the release of the macOS version of NewsWave I decided against rewriting Excelling in SwiftUI & swift yet. The app is still performing correctly and I do not feel the improvements from a rewrite justify the opportunity costs. 

In addition to the above, I started spending more time on non-apple technologies such as Python, LAMP Systems and ML. This will allow me to create better FullStack, multiOS applications and services in the future. 

I’m quite pleased with the progress in 2020 and I’m really excited about all the 2021 possibilities. I’ll be focusing on that part on an upcoming post. 

Side note, if you’re interested in Python, or you’d like to refresh your knowledge I strongly recommend this free course from dabeaz -> https://dabeaz-course.github.io/practical-python/ 

Comments/feedback? Do reach me @MarcMasVi on Twitter or marc.maset@hey.com

Marc