Game plan update: 8 months later

I wrote a blog post in the beginning of the year talking about my 2017 game plan. On this post I’m going to talk about what worked and what didn’t work after 8 months.

Freelancing 😀🙌

In January, my main focus was to work as a full time iOS freelancer and that is going really well. I still do not want to apply for a 9–5 job and It’s just amazing how much freedom I currently have. With a lot of freedom, there’s also a lot of responsibility, so, with the help of a whiteboard + Evernote, I’ve been organizing my short, middle and long term tasks.

In the past 2 months I spent a lot of my time to get an accountant and open my company. Now, everything is fully OK and I’m definitely a better and more professional freelancer.

Money 🤑

To be fair, I was barely making enough money to survive until the beginning of the year, but things got really well in March, when I took a serious consulting job for a big bank in Brazil for 3 months. After that, I was able to maintain the money I was making and save $2000 per month as I expected.

Open Source 🙂

AwesomeiOS grew a lot in the past months. In January 3rd, we had 16,890 stars, and since then we had a 25% increase in just 8 months, reaching 21,170 stars. Our main focus currently is to maintain the good quality of the repo by removing deprecated / abandoned libs, so our community can easily find what they need as fast as possible.

Unfortunately I currently do not have the same time as I did in January since freelancing is taking most of it, but I always try to contribute and accept PRs at least once every 2 weeks.

• AwesomeiOS new website: it is almost ready, but @vsouza and I haven’t found time to finish it. We really wanna release it and it is close. We hope to finish it by the end of the year
• Twitter bot: I created a better version of the bot in March and it is better than the old one, but there’s still a lot of room of improvement. Next step is for the bot to show the lib’s name, description and number of stars. I hope to get this done by the end of the year
• AwesomeiOS.Weekly: We had 8 issues and 1.2k+ subscribers, but because of my contract work in March, I had to pause the newsletter. I’m currently organized enough to get back to writing weekly posts. To succeed, I will try to find someone to help me out with the curation.
• EZSwiftExtensions: The lib is currently being mainly managed by @Khalian , which is doing an amazing job with new Swift extensions and managing the pull requests. I really wish I had more time to get back to this lib since I use it on every single project.

Going Outside iOS 😪

In January, I really wanted to learn more about backend and do more Continuous Integration stuff. I talk to @vsouza very often and he is always sending me links and teaching me new stuff about backend and how to escalate servers. Unfortunately I didn’t have enough time this year to dive into coding more with Python as I wanted to. I also found it really difficult to convince my clients to “waste time and money” to setup a Travis, write unit tests and integrate Fastlane.

Books 😰

As I said in the post, I’m not a big book person. That continues to be valid as I didn’t read a single page of the books I wanted to read this year.

New Languages 🙂

My plan was to have basic German by the end of the year. I was doing Duolingo for 30 minutes every single day until March, when I started the big consulting job. Yesterday I started learning German again and it is a big goal I want to achieve.

Blog 😭

My plan was to do 3–4 posts per month. We can see that I failed miserably because my last post was in January! I wanna blame 10% of it because my writing experience sucked. I had to write it in Evernote, paste it into Medium and then work through getting all the headers and pictures right. I just downloaded and subscribed to Ulysses, which is an amazing writing tool which integrates beautifully with Medium. It also let’s me write in Markdown, which is a huge productivity increase. I’m a really used to Markdown because I’ve been writing for years in AwesomeiOS. I really hope I can write more so I can learn new things and share with the world.

Conferences 😀

I love attending conferences because it is just awesome to learn new things and meet incredible people in such a small timeframe. My initial plan was to attend 3–5 conferences this year, which would include WWDC, try!Swift and others I was still researching about. Plans changed and I attended the Úll conference in Ireland.

Úll

“Úll is a conference for people who build and love great products”, which focuses more on the experience and people rather than products and actual programming. It was an amazing conference and it really made me think differently: there was an Apple escape room, I learned how to take notes with Ben Norris, learned how tech is present on totally different areas such as Coffee with Colin Harmon and so many other things I should write an entire blog post about it.

WWDC

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend WWDC because of my contract work, which ended 3 weeks after the conference. I still did not have time to dive into all the talks, but will definitely do and blog about it.

try!Swift

Try!Swift was awesome in 2016, so I couldn’t miss this year. It starts in 20 days and I’m going to New York to watch amazing talks, talk to old friends and make new ones.

Other conferences

I really do not feel the need to go to another conference after try!Swift because I will be traveling for 2.5 months and conferences can get really expensive. I hope to schedule my 2018 conferences by the end of November

Meetups 😑

I’ve been attending CocoaHeads Brazil almost every month, but haven’t spoken at any yet. Again, time is really short

Email: Inbox zero achieved 🙌

By the end of last week, I had 10 thousand emails in my inbox. I currently have zero. I was able to do that by reading, deleting and archiving every single email until January 1st. I decided to put all older emails in a folder, which I hope I’ll never ever open. #inboxZeroAchieved

Summing up 😎

I’ve definitely achieved my biggest goal, which was to be a full time, professional freelancer. I can’t even think of everything I learned about the business in the past 8 months that I’ll use for the rest of my life. I’m not just a college dropout who codes for money. I’m a professional who has a freelance business.

I’ve also definitely underestimated how much time I’d have to complete everything I wanted to do. I think there’s still time to check some items off the list, but I still have my main goal which is my freelancing.