2021 in Summary

2021 was an exciting year for me in several areas:

• career and OSS
• content creation
• personal

Career and OSS

I remained at Cypress during 2021. We launched the alpha of our component testing runner, and are working towards GA (general availability).

I also continued working on various OSS projects, mainly around Vue and Test Utils. Test Utils v2 is stable and positioned well moving into 2022, when Vue 3 should become the main version on npm.

Content Creation

I re-recorded both of my Udemy courses. They performed really well, I'm really happy to make some money while doing what I love - coding and teaching.

My first book, Design Patterns for Vue.js also continued to do well, for a total of $5120 during 2021. I sell this via Gumroad. I also made a little on my courses, which are sold via Gumroad in addition to Udemy (Vue.js 3: The Composition API did $1271, and Complete Vue.js did $535).

Total revenue is shown below. I'm excited and honored people are happy to pay for my educational content.

I also continued growing my internet presence via my YouTube channel.

Here's a graphic:

I'm almost eligible for monitizing my channel!

Personal

A big year on a personal basis, too. I feel like many years of hard work have finally started to pay off:

House

After many years of saving, I purchased a house! Lily did a great job with the interior design. Here are some photos.

I also got two black cats:

Communication Skills

I participated in a weekly bookclub with my friends, where we study communication skills, empathy and leadership. I started recording our sessions more diligently around May. Here's a list of books/videos we covered:

• 2020/05/11 Managing Expectations
• 2020/05/18 The Harvard Principles of Negotiation
• 2020/05/25 How to Explain Technical Things to A Non-Technical Person
• 2020/06/01 How To Argue With Someone Who Won't Listen
• 2020/06/08 9 Essential Ways to Develop Empathy
• 2020/06/15 How to be an Effective Leader
• 2020/06/22 IQ vs Emotional Intelligence
• 2020/06/29 Level 5 Leadership
• 2020/07/06 3 Levels of Communication
• 2020/07/13 How to change beliefs
• 2020/07/20 Think Again
• 2020/08/03 4 POWERFUL Tricks to PERSUADE and INFLUENCE Anyone
• 2020/08/10 5 Tips to Make Assertive Communication
• 2020/08/17 How to Improve Communication Skills at the Workplace
• 2020/08/24 The Unspoken Rules of Leadership
• 2020/08/31 How to Delegate Effectively
• 2020/09/07 Communication Styles of the 16 MBTI Types
• 2020/09/24 One on One Meeting Questions Great Managers Ask Their Teams
• 2020/09/21 The Leader in You (Dale Carnegie)
• 2020/09/28 Brief by Joseph McCormack
• 2020/10/05 The Enneagram at Work
• 2020/10/12 Anxiety at Work
• 2020/10/19 Getting More by Stuart Diamond
• 2020/10/26 No Nonsense Meditation by Steven Laurey
• 2020/11/09 Brain Wash
• 2020/11/16 Switch
• 2020/12/07 Art of Business
• 2020/12/14 Success and Luck

I learned a lot about communication, empathy and how to be more open minded. The skills definitely translated into my life - one of the topics, Emotional Intelligence, claimed people with higher EQs generally earn more than their high IQ counter parts. I am earning more than ever and got the biggest raise I've ever received without changing jobs, and I think it's primarily due to my improved soft skills. These skills I've learned are probably the most high impact change of 2021.

Moving Forward

I'm excited for 2022. I'd like to keep up with:

• communication skills
• content creation, passive income

As well as start some new activities:

• learning more about home improvement, eg how to build a drain, fix a car, do landscaping, etc.
• how to cook better
• start a small business (maybe)
• start to work out again and improve fitness (mainly via body weight exercises)
• continue to build my brand and career
• figure out what the heck is next in my life! I feel like I'm living the dream already - generally I like to live by the motto "get comfortable been uncomfortable", and I'm getting a bit too comfy lately, so I think it's time to change things up.

Until next year!