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#DieHimmels­traeumerin

iOS dev • sketchnoting • accessibility • pineapple on pizza • sports • she/her

Jan 1, 2022 ⋅ 16 min read

Thoughts about 2021

In 2021 I...

  • learned how to longboard
  • quit my first job and joined Spotify
  • had my first viral tweet with a sketchnote of WWDC keynote
  • climbed 135 routes, most of them outdoors
  • created over a hundred sketchnotes, 40 of them are uploaded on this website
Collage of 9 pictures: Sketchnotes on desk, me climbing with a view, stand up paddeling in the baltic sea, ice cream on the couch with Spotify Macbook on my legs, outdoor pool with green trees, me making a trick on the longboard, me rock climbing, winter sunset with snow on roofs, summer sunset after swimming
My 2021 in pictures.

Can’t believe another year is over. I want it to be a tradition to reflect about the last year. I wrote down my thoughts about 2019 and 2020 and it helped me to remind me of my challenges, learnings and what I enjoyed the most.

2021 was definitely a year with lots of ups and downs for me!

Jump to specific topics:

I quit my very first job and now... what?

The year definitely started with a low for me. I couldn’t focus and was restless, driveless and emotional very quickly. I’ve quit my very first job with lots of emotions inside me. I’ve read somewhere that you’re more attached to your first job than others. I can say it wasn’t an easy decision but I needed a change. So, without having an alternative in sight, I quit my job.

I needed time to get some distance and to be able to think clearly again. "What’s next?" was a question I was asking myself a lot. Should I continue developing iOS apps or try out something totally different? Maybe working as harvester? Selling ice cream? Doing some volunteer work? Helping others? Working on something that really matters? I tried to find something like that half-hearted, but nothing worked out. Perhaps because I didn’t really try hard enough.

But there was a way to combine my experience with something that really matters to me: developing apps with accessibility in mind. So at some point, I started to apply for iOS developer positions again.

Developing iOS apps is what I learned, what I’m experienced in and what brings me joy (normally) but I learned that I need the focus on accessibility. So I tested the accessibility on apps before I applied to the job. So many apps don’t even have basic accessibility support for Dynamic Type or Voice Over. You would get most of the features for free when you would use standard UI elements. But of course (😒) that’s not what most companys do. They want their own UI elements... and forget implementing accessibility features on top of the elements. When I talked about that in some interviews, I heard a lot of excuses. But when I look back, I’m glad that it didn’t work out. I’m tired of trying to change peoples mindsets. If they don’t know about accessibility in 2021, they possibly just don’t want to know about it. It seems like they don’t care. So I don’t care about working for them. I know that now.

What surprised me is that most companies prioritize to find out how you write code over how much you know about things that would help actual users to use their app. The kind of questions they ask are mostly about design patterns and architecture, which is fine when you’re interviewing for a non junior position, but in most interviews I wasn’t asked any questions about how I would build accessible apps.

You get asked about a lot of different topics in interviews which you don’t have to explain every day, so I sat down and re-learned some iOS basics. I created a few "easy to look up" sketchnotes about possible iOS interview topics. See the twitter thread or the blog post with more details about it. For one of my interviews I also did refreshers on algorithms, data structures, system design and behavioral interviews, but they’re not on my website (yet). Would someone be interested in these?

Collection of sketchnotes about interview preparation
Collection of sketchnotes for interview preparation

At some point I was yolo enough to just send out applications even though I didn’t even think the company will ever reach out to me. But the opposite happened and I went through all interviews at Spotify successfully to my surprise. Well, kinda. But in the end, I got a job offer and finally accepted. 🥳

My biggest reasons for joining Spotify were:

  • I’m a big fan of the Spotify app and use it every day myself
  • they care deeply about topics like accessibility and inclusion
  • the role is perfect for me: I’m working on the design system - very UI focused - to make it easy for others to build accessible UI components
  • many intelligent and amazing people work there, so I can learn a lot from them

Participate in iOS Chats

I did my very first interview about how I started with iOS development and more! Filip Němeček interviewed me for iOS Chats in March! It was super fun and you can read about it here:

How to be one of the cool kids

End of March, I got my first longboard and started to learn how to ride it. This is one of the things which looks super easy when you watch a pro, but you need to stand on a board once to understand that you need a lot of time, practice and passion to get so good that it looks easy. It’s even a bit scary in the beginning... but it’s also super fun! And after a short time you get to see and feel the progress.

After a few weeks, I even started to learn some tricks and you need to be super brave to jump on or with the board! You have to outplay your mind and just do it, which sounds easy... but guess what... it’s not! I usually tried the tricks on grass first to build up some confidence (and trick my brain) before I tried them on the street.

Looking forward to good weather to continue my journey on the board.

More remote conferences

I enjoy being on conferences, even remote ones! When I saw the speaker line up, I immediately knew, that I don’t want to miss SwiftHeroes in April 2021. If you’re interested in my sketchnotes of the talks I watched, you can find them in this twitter thread or on my website. They had two tracks, so I had to decide which talk I want to see. You can watch all the talks on their youtube playlist.

This tweet made my day:

First Viral Tweet???

In June, it was WWDC time! Aaaaand somehow my keynote sketchnote exploded on twitter 😄 This was definitely the tweet with the most interactions and impressions on my feed, not only in 2021, but EVER.

I’m really happy when people enjoy my sketchnotes and support me in what I’m doing. It makes all the effort of doing live sketchnotes on conferences or keynotes even more worth. Thank you for your support 🙏

Let’s talk about mental health

In August, I shared some of my routines which help me to take care of my mental health. Read about my routines and about how it’s really going.

For me the most important things are:

  • Get enough sleep
  • Set boundaries
  • Move every day
  • Meditate and be mindful

But, of course, only knowing about what helps your mental health isn’t enough, you also have to do these things. Obviously. That was my personal project the whole year (and it will also be in the future) and I’m improving a lot, but also get reminded quite quickly how important it is for me, if I let it slip for some days or even weeks.

I’m very glad that Spotify has a mental health initiative called Heart & Soul to "raise awareness and remove stigma, provide proactive self-care and professional support, and normalize the conversation surrounding mental health". They provide a lot of materials to inform about the impact of mental health. All employees had a Wellness week in November for exactly this reason and the World Mental Health Day was celebrated internally with virtual talks, workshops, and panels related to mental well-being. All employees were encouraged to participate and not "work on their normal tasks" this day.

These initiatives help me to think about my mental health more often. It’s not a taboo topic, it’s present in our daily lives and that’s one thing I really love about Spotify.

It’s okay to not be okay.

Gimme more sketchnotes

In November, I did my first sketchnoting workshop at Spotify in a smaller setting with my squad and our sister squad. It was the first workshop in 2021 and around one year after my workshop at NSSpain 2020!

The workshop was of course remote for everyone and in English! It was a huge success and it was so much fun! The best thing after a workshop is to see people continue using their newly learned technique and even people who were really sceptical about this beforehand, changed their minds and were totally focussed in the workshop and loved it. 🥰

In the same week, it was NSSpain 2021 as well! Yay! You can see my NSSpain sketchnotes on twitter or on my website. This time I was a bit more confident than last year to talk to others in English, because it’s my new normal now at work. But it still costs me a great deal of effort to talk to others, so I’m super proud that I did it. I’m happy that I got to meet a lot of new people 👋

The most surprising thing happened after I joined a table to talk to others, I was asked if I was "the same Feli who creates the sketchnotes" and that they had only three tabs in their browser: one for the conference platform, one for the agenda and my Twitter thread with the sketchnotes 😆 I never thought something like this would ever happen! But definitely the best feeling! Thank you for sharing that with me! It made my day and I still smile when I think about it.

Still working from home

Since the pandemic started in March 2020, I’m working from home. Since I started at Spotify, I’m even working from home officially. So even if there were offices in my area and they would open, I could stay at home. It changed from a situational and temporary setup to a long term setup.

After nearly two years now, I can definitely say, I don’t like the lonely lunch breaks. So, if it’s safe to do so, I really enjoy meeting friends during the lunch break! I’ll definitely try to do that more often in 2022. If anyone wants to be my lunch buddy and is in my area, write me a message haha 😆

I’m also really looking forward to meet the folks from my new team in real person some day (maybe in 2022 🤞). I have never met them in real life before!

In general, I still like working from home! Since it’s now long term setup, I made my work station as ergonomic as possible, so I got a height adjustable desk, a new chair, a pillow to put my feet on (it’s so comfy), a new ergonomic mouse and a 4K monitor. Yes, that’s a lot, but I can already feel how good it is for my back and also for how I feel when I work on my desk. I just love it there, so I’m having a lot of positive emotions when working, just because it’s comfy and highly adjustable. Can only recommend to invest in that.

It’s the most exciting thing to talk to others from different countries with just a button tap. During my virtual Intro Days at Spotify, I talked to people from New Delhi, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Paris and Tokyo. This still blows my mind how easy it is and I love it!

That everything is now in English was something I was a bit scared of in the beginning. I was constantly using a translator to double check if my messages were correct and I forgot the translation for a lot of words in live conversations. I was just not used to use my English skills. But this is now different after six months. Of course, practice is the key and I’m now more in the "I don’t care if it’s correct" mood because most of the people are non native speakers as well and they have the same issues sometimes. Usually you’ll understand each other even if it’s not 100% gramatically correct. So, I feel more light-hearted about this topic now. It already happened a LOT of times that I think in English or I don’t remember the German word for something or I’m randomly asking others what this German word would be in English, because I was just thinking about it. 😅 By the way, if you’re a non native speaker and have trouble in pair programming sessions to name signs like these ()[]{},.:* correctly, here is a service tweet for you. I constantly forget how you call these. But I guess in a year this won’t be an issues anymore, at all.

I love sport

I started to go rock climbing in 2020 and I still enjoy it a lot. Being in the nature with my sister, her husband and other lovely people is the best thing I can imagine for a perfect weekend.

Rock climbing is not only about muscles and technique, but also about mental strength and trust in your abilities. Most of the time I’m not very brave when I’m at a difficult part of the route and I fear to fall in the rope. I need others to cheer me on to at least try it, to actually try it. Sometimes this helps and I’m succeeding but sometimes I just give up without trying at all. It’s fine as well, because climbing for me is about having fun and I will definitely come back and try it again the next time. Overcoming my fears is something I will continue to work on in 2022, because fear shouldn’t stop me, that’s why I have the rope and someone I trust as my belayer.

I’m grateful to spend so much time with my sister doing something we both enjoy a lot. ❤️

In 2020, I started to go swimming again and wanted to learn freestyle. At that time I couldn’t even do two strokes before I started having panic attacks and needed a break to breathe. Read about my swimming journey if you haven’t already. But now I can’t wait to go swimming again! The second half of 2021 was the time where I improved a lot! Since late November you need to get a negative rapid test at an official test center in order to enter the swimming pool, so I wasn’t swimming a lot anymore. It was too time consuming in my opinion. I also need 30 minutes to get to the swimming pool plus the time to ride to a test center, wait for your turn and for the result... But I will continue with swimming when it’s more safe and a bit less time consuming in 2022.

My record in 2021 was, that I suprisingly swam 2km in under 1 hour, most of it in freestyle. That’s a HUGE success for me and I couldn’t be more proud 🥳

Annual commit history

It’s a tradition to analyze my annual commit history at the end of December. The report is only from my personal work in 2021. Credits for the script go to @markusfisch.

I wasn’t very active in my side projects in 2021 compared to the year before. I love that "Sketchnote" is top 2 of my most used words in commit messages, because it means I’ve uploaded a lot of new sketchnotes on my website! 🙌

In 2021 Feli made 266 commits in 14 projects.
The average length of a commit message was 36 characters.

Commits per weekday
    Monday      64 *********************************************************************
   Tuesday      28 ******************************
 Wednesday      62 ******************************************************************
  Thursday      20 *********************
    Friday      20 *********************
  Saturday      18 *******************
    Sunday      54 **********************************************************

Commits per month
       Jan      31 *********************************
       Feb      64 *********************************************************************
       Mar      61 *****************************************************************
       Apr      33 ***********************************
       May      19 ********************
       Jun      17 ******************
       Jul       4 ****
       Aug      10 **********
       Sep      13 **************
       Oct       4 ****
       Nov       6 ******
       Dec       4 ****

Lines added (+) and removed (-) per weekday
    Monday    4023                                                    ++++++++++
   Tuesday    3347                                                    ++++++++
 Wednesday    6978                                                    +++++++++++++++++
  Thursday     857                                                    ++
    Friday     217                                                    
  Saturday    1090                                                    ++
    Sunday  -19813 ---------------------------------------------------

Lines added (+) and removed (-) per month
       Jan    1782                                                         ++++++
       Feb    3443                                                         +++++++++++
       Mar  -16506 --------------------------------------------------------
       Apr    3753                                                         ++++++++++++
       May    2161                                                         +++++++
       Jun      68                                                         
       Jul     136                                                         
       Aug      81                                                         
       Sep     105                                                         
       Oct     116                                                         
       Nov     281                                                         
       Dec    1279                                                         ++++

Top 3 words in commit messages (ignoring words up to three letters)
    Update      53 *********************************************************************
Sketchnote      21 ***************************
      more      19 ************************

I’m always a bit scared of challenges and trying out new things... but all in all 2021 proves that I can do it anyway. I worked a lot on being more brave and going for the change and gladly it worked out for me. I’m super proud and grateful for that experiences and all the new people I met.

Stay safe everyone and a happy new year!

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