I couldn’t find any better phrase that describes the approach I’ve learned in the last year. It’s a simple piece of advice: Test your plans by reducing time.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the amount of our free time is stable and we’ll also be able to spend the same number of hours on things in the future.

Sooner or later, you’ll need to put most of your effort and attention in a specific direction. Eventually, you’ll push every insignificant activity in the background, and you may struggle to find even minutes to deal with the rest of your stuff. Starting of studies, new relationship, new job, starting a family – they are only examples of events that can change your priority. If you want to stick to your routines, you need to change the approach to performing tasks.

When we talk about software development, sooner or later someone starts a discussion about tests. In our world, tests are considered as something helpful and crucial to our work. However, sometimes we need to face with people who have a different opinion about it. Moreover, it’s hard to find a proper argument, especially for a person who pays you and who wants to utilize your time effectively.

How can you convince your boss to let you write tests? Should you even ask for permission?

Before you start your blog, you have to perform a set of essential choices – topics you want to write about, domain name, and the way you’ll publish your content. I choose the self-hosted WordPress platform with a slightly customized theme that I found on the Internet.

After more than two years of blogging, I migrated all my content to Hugo. In this article, I would like to show you why I decided to move on from WordPress to Hugo – a static page generator.

When I think about a new idea or my next goal in life, I usually think big. The goal has to be ambitious and attractive to me, otherwise, it’s not worth putting effort into it. However, big goals also overwhelm me, because I don’t know where I should start. So I prepare. And I think. And I prepare. And I think. And this loop goes on.

It changed. The endless loop of thinking about the best approach to achieve the goal or to do whatever you want means that you probably try to start with something big. To break it, just do the opposite – think big, but start small.

The end of the year is presumably a good time for reflection and review. I don’t have any strict structure for annual reviews. I did them many times before, but I haven’t found any process that I stick to. I used to set goals and check if I accomplished them. However, this year I tried something different.

Each professional group has own specialized vocabulary. It consists of words often related to tools, technologies or processes. They make everyday communication smooth and effective. Yet, this way of communication is appropriate only for specific environments.

5 years have passed since I had started working as a professional software developer. Although the programming was my hobby since the early years, my skill started to grow when I had taken a real job.

I was surprised when I had recalled my very beginning because I noticed how much I had changed and how big progress I had taken. So, I decided to write it down.

In this article, I’ll take you on a short journey where I’ll tell you about my development process. You’ll find out what I’ve been thinking about, what I’ve been working on and ultimately what changed from my perspective. Ready?

A long time since my last article. During the last few months, I was fully involved in my last big project at my university. Dozens of articles and books, hundreds of visited pages and thousands of words later I had finished it and a few weeks later I defended my master’s thesis.

Since I took a short break from almost every activity, I had a lot of time for thinking. When I look at 2012, I see the young guy who knows everything he needs and he wants to only the paper to confirm it. Now, in 2018, I’m equipped with knowledge, a completely new point of view and goals in life. But it wasn’t so obvious even during my education.

Some people asked me what studies gives me at all. Was it worth to spend almost every weekend for the last 6 years at the university? Do I feel the difference? There are no simple answers to these questions because they depend on the approach. And it changed over time. But let me sum up.

Whenever people say about New Year’s changes they, mainly think about resolutions, plans and set up goals. But this is also a great time to small retrospective both your personal and digital life.

Let’s talk about the digital once.

Do you realize how many registrations have you performed over the last year? Or over the last 5 years? Who did you give your email, personal data, photos, documents or other files to? Too often, it’s too much to know about all this.

Think about each website, application or service which you used and you didn’t use it for a long long time. Social profiles, cloud storage, dedicated tools and the other software. In each of them, you probably left some data. Maybe it’s not relevant and doesn’t have any value for you, but this information is about you.

What if one day, someone will get access to all of these data you left in the Internet?

In September, I wanted to try something new, so I started a simple project to check my abilities in UX and front-end development. The idea was simple — create customizable, reusable and highly accessible buttons. I have experience with front-end but I usually use CSS frameworks like Bootstrap or Foundation. But not now. I decided to design the whole page completely from scratch.