I'm proud of

Just the other day I was looking through my work for the year. My products like Lists Kit, Lifelog, Carrd plugins. The app I code for my freelance gig. Just kinda randomly browsing, admiring, reviewing, reflecting.

And couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride coming through. I felt what it felt like after a good day’s work. And no matter what the lack of progress or results I sometimes complain about, the quality of the work stands. I’ve done good work this year. My client of my freelance app tell me that. I look through my own products - I can see the care in UX and business. It might not sound like much in a larger scheme of hitting my goal, but it’s a honest year’s work.

In the headlong push towards a future goal, it’s easy to stop and forgot to take stock, and celebrate things like that. I always do that. Always future-oriented, seldom appreciative of my efforts.

This is a good way to end on a good note for the year:

I’m proud of the frontend designs I made for my client’s app. All the more proud this was done in Rails which I was not even familiar with starting out!

I’m proud of the features I shipped for Lifelog this year. The search pages, inline search, dark mode, inline @ mentions. Tricky features which I overcome, and enjoying now. And the best part - keeping Lifelog alive for the lovely community here.

I’m proud of sustaining momentum on my Carrd plugins. I didn’t quite hit 12 plugins in 12 months like last year, but continued to keep going. And it continues to pay off and grow slowly and steadily.

I’m proud of my experiments in Lists Kit, even though it ended up doing not quite as good as I hoped it would be. Lots of interesting features and ideas I shipped on it, in plain Javascript, which would later come in useful.

I’m proud of my little fun side projects I made even though I was busy af. ICQ button, blue screen of death, Github chart remixer. Stuff like this can feel like a waste of time since it doesn’t make money, but it helped me keep going, and on this indie journey, momentum is everything.

I’m proud of my work this year.

And grateful to still be in the game.