2017 in Review, Part 2: Our personal highlights

Our team recalls some of their biggest personal breakthroughs from last year.

Published in

Per

My homepage

An ongoing thing that will last until the end of the Web (or the end of me). With all the centralization of content into fewer, larger silos these days, having your own website feels more important than ever to me.

My Raspberry Pi based VCR

A small and dirty Ruby thing that automatically downloads various video content from YouTube and SVT Play, and puts it on my NAS. Soon it will also harvest videos from NHL.com, thanks to their JSON API.

Henrik

Fixed long standing physical weaknesses

I’ve been suffering from tight hamstrings and lingering lower back issues for years. Likely caused by a combination of too much sitting and a weak posterior chain. The physical therapy I’ve done in the past has been mostly short term fixes when the back has acted up. In 2017 I started seeing a physical therapist/trainer that focuses on sports performance, mostly from a CrossFit point of view. As always consistency is key. Identifying weaknesses and establishing a daily routine has increased my strength and range of motion. There is still lots of room for improvement, so it will be interesting to see how much progress I can make before the end of 2018.

Climbing

My 9-year old started in a climbing school at the beginning of 2017 and this required a parent to accompany her and belay. As part of the green card course I needed to climb too. I tried indoor climbing 15+ years ago and found it really scary at the time, so I just decided it wasn’t for me and moved on. This meant that I was pretty nervous about giving it another go, but quickly realized it was much less scary than I remembered. I’ve since bought my own equipment and a day pass at the climbing gym. It’s great exercise and I’ve started using the working from the café at the center. I’m still a bit nervous when climbing high on my own using the auto-belay, but it feels really rewarding to push the limits of my comfort zone.

Filippos

Cut down sugar — no more croissants

I took it seriously since 1st of January and already lost 5kg. My goal is to lose as much fat as possible, decrease sugar intake and slowly focus on muscle growing.

Started going to the gym regularly

That’s something I‘ve been trying to achieve for a couple years now, but it feels that now it could actually happen. The combination of diet + gym is very motivational, I have to say!

Refined my tennis serve

If you see someone hitting serves in an empty court in Stockholm, it’s probably gonna be me. Until June, I want to have the best possible serve, to increase my aces. I need my serve to be my sneakiest and biggest weapon in the game! Now I am hitting 1 hour of serves every Wednesday after my tennis training and one more hour in the week when I find time.

Ricardo

2017 was a year where I explored my entrepreneurial instincts and created several products, along with friends/colleagues:

Coinvision

Messenger/Telegram bot + Platform with alerts, predictions and information about the crypto currency market.

strim.in

trimin let’s you watch videos with anyone, anywhere, synchronized at the same time.

Pickit

Pick a movie that all your friends want to watch in a fun experience.

Eduardo

Restarted making music

As a teenager, I used to spend big chunks of my time after school fiddling with Fruity Loops. As my adult duties gradually kicked in, I was forced to let it go, but I’ve missed it ever since. Last year, I decided to get back into the game, and set up a small little studio next to my work desk. Started out with an Ableton Push and have been slowly adding to it. Managed to put out a small EP last year, which is nice for a start.

Back to the gym

I’ve spent a small portion of 2017 unable to walk and a big one unable to run — all thanks to a nasty ankle injury. So it’s safe to say I didn’t get as much exercise as I would have liked to. To counter that, I got myself into the gym as soon as I felt confident enough to put some weight on my injured foot. After a few months, I’m still going strong at it, which is a small but welcome step in the right direction.

Nikolay

Motion

In 2017 I got more and more into motion design. Started experimenting with Principle and After Effects on the design side of things, and with ThreeJS on the frontend side. Looking forward to honing those skills further in 2018.

Tools

Not much has changed in my daily apps routine, but I notice that in 2017 Sketch plugins started making waves, and I rely on more and more plugins each day. Tried Abstract briefly (git for designers) but I’m not convinced yet.

Osvaldas

Owning a pet

In 2017 we got a dog. Having a dog teaches you a healthy habit to make regular breaks a few times per day. Moreover, after a walk in the park you can see the same thing you’ve been working on in a different light.

Ivan

www.trainerspot.sk

Find the best personal trainer (or skiing instructor, yoga classes etc.) in your area.

Kollegorna is a team of designers, developers and strategists building first-rate digital products and services.