On my side, 2018 ended with a bang. We learned that my wife was pregnant with our second child. I cannot express how happy and proud we are, and I wish 2019 to be a great year, as much on the family level as on the professional level. Here’s my professional ambitions for this new year to come.

Working more on Collabd, launching a first version before the end of the year

Talking about babies, this is another one of mine. A “Software baby”, if I might say 😁. Collabd is a side project that I started about 6 months ago, from the idea of centralizing all communications that I had with my clients, my team and the consultants that we hire on some projects. On our day-to-day basis, we have to collaborate with people using different workflow, like using HipChat instead of Slack, or Basecamp over Trello. Collabd will then allow project managers and his team to keep all information in one place, while clients keep using their favorite platforms (until Collabd becomes the favorite)! My goal is to document my progress every now and then on this blog.

Blog More

I really tried over the year to blog as much as I can, but like you might know, project like these tend to be put aside when time is running out. That’s why at the end of 2018, I started to create this simple blog using Gatsby. I spend more time writing the stuff that I want, instead of wasting my time optimizing my pages, like I used to do with WordPress. Don’t read me wrong, I ❤️ WordPress with all my heart, but I sometimes find it too overkill for developing a simple blogging platform without any tagging and categorizing!

Open Sourcing my abandoned side projects

Like I did with blogging projects over the last years, I had to move away from a lot of side projects, to the profit of more lucrative ones (AKA my daily job). I still see lots of potential in some of them, but I just don’t have the required level of focus to make them great. Some are already working as is, so why not giving it back to the community so peoples could build great things on top of them! Here are some projects that I’d like to polish a bit and u-load on GitHub during the year:

  • Estimator: A simple Progressive Web App using Directus' headless CMS to allow users to quickly estimate small to large projects like websites or graphic design projects. I made this project in 2018 to sharpen my skills with ES6 and also, learn what all the fuzz with PWA and Headless CMS was!
  • WordPress Ajax Filters: Every now and then, while developing for WordPress, I always stumbled on post filtering and pagination. Until the day that I decided to just develop a plugin that actually do what I wanted it to, unlike the bunch of heavy plugins that are found on the marketplace. Since this plugin is already on GitHub, I would just like to push it to the WordPress plugins directory for once, so people can use it too.
  • WordPress Share Tools: This one has to be one of my most complete plugins that I made for WordPress. It's actually doing almost everything that I want it to do, but like the other WP Plugin listed above, it is not accessible on the plugin directory yet, only on GitHub for now.
  • Boilerplates and templates: During the year, I built myself a bunch of templates to start from whether I wanted to build a PWA, a WordPress theme or a simple JS app.

That’s it!

Only three goals, but since I really want to achieve them, I prefer to stay humble, since I know that the second baby, who is coming later this summer will take much of my time on the second half of the year. My main goal is to launch Collabd as soon as I a viable version, so stay tuned.

Happy 2019 to all of you!