The Last of My Twenties: Looking Back on 2019

Only about 10 days remain in 2019, the year I’m sending off my last twenties. Sure, turning thirty doesn’t fundamentally change anything, but since it’s the first time my age’s first digit changes since turning twenty, I feel a bit unsettled.

Compared to last year, this year held a lot of meaning for me. I tried various things and reaped some fruits from those attempts. Some of these challenges were development-related, others were just things I wanted to try — but either way, it feels meaningful that I tried so many things compared to last year.

So in this post, I want to write a retrospective chronologically listing the major things I experienced this year.

Publishing a Book Written Over a Year

First, the Vue.JS book I’d been writing with a friend since last year was published at the end of July 2019.

The title’s a bit unusual, so many people ask “can you really finish it with just one cup of coffee?” Honestly, the publisher chose the title, so I don’t really know. (They never said how many liters the coffee cup was)

I first received the writing offer around August 2018, and the book published July 31, 2019 — so roughly a year total. The first month or two was spent planning the book’s content and aligning with my co-author friend, so about 10 months of actual writing.

Honestly, I started thinking it’d be like a long blog post, but there were way more differences from blogging than I expected. Blog posts contain at most 200-300 lines of short content, but writing 400 pages worth of content that flows in a single breath was an extremely unfamiliar experience.

Plus, unlike blog posts, this was a project with a clear deadline. No matter how tired I was after work on weekdays, I had to write the book, making it quite hard to maintain focus.

Beyond the book’s content, I also had to write and test 2 SPA applications and an API server application as examples for the book. Even with two people working together, it was tough.

We shared the APIs we wrote through Postman

That’s why my friend and I explored various methods to maximize efficiency, one of which was the idea of writing the book using Git and Markdown.

The publisher originally asked us to write in MS Word, but Word has the problem of requiring manual mouse clicks or keyboard shortcuts to apply style formats like headings and footnotes. Markdown, however, lets you batch-apply unified styles using CSS later, making it far more efficient.

After finishing the final draft, we used a library called Pandoc to convert *.md files to *.docx files and sent them to the publisher.

Also, since we both constantly use Git for work and side projects, we were comfortable with it. We could version control both the example applications and book writing using Git, which let us shorten work time significantly and catch bugs or missed parts.

Plus, since all the book’s content was written in Markdown and could only merge to the master branch after passing code review, the process was great for aligning on parts where our opinions differed.

Fiercely debating whether SSR servers are frontend territory or not

My co-author is a very close friend, but this was the first time we worked together on something this official beyond side projects. We had some minor conflicts during the writing process because our working styles didn’t match.

But these moments actually let us properly understand each other’s work styles, and the process of aligning our differences became good memories.

For detailed content and a retrospective about the book writing process, I wrote a separate post called A Common Developer’s Journey to Becoming an Author that you can check out.

Getting Serious About Blogging

Actually, I wasn’t someone who wrote blog posts diligently. If you look at my archive, you can see posting volume suddenly increased sharply starting in June 2019 — right when book writing was wrapping up and I was receiving reviews from reviewers.

Also, posts before June 2019 — like calculating planetary orbits or building simple neural networks — felt more like an archive for content I’d studied. But posts written after June 2019 started covering more general topics like JavaScript and Git.

The reason posting volume increased and topics changed at this point wasn’t just that my writing skills grew through book writing — the bigger reason was a slight shift in my mindset about blog posting after this point.

I’m fundamentally not someone with a lot of confidence in my skills. So I thought “whatever I know, everyone else probably knows too.” But book writing changed my thinking through the study sessions we held.

My friend and I held study sessions doubling as book reviews with others using content we’d written during the writing process. When study participants told us the book’s content really helped their learning, I thought for the first time “the knowledge I have actually helps other developers.”

After that, I changed my blog posting theme from “for my own study” to “organizing and sharing knowledge I have,” and started sharing blog posts with others.

After sharing blog posts for about 5 months, people who read my posts started sending feedback through channels like Facebook messages, LinkedIn, and email saying “I enjoyed reading this” or “This was helpful.” Receiving these messages motivated me to keep writing blog posts.

My growing organic traffic graph

And I don’t just write technical content — I occasionally write essay posts too. This process helps me organize thoughts or settle unsettled feelings, so it’s quite helpful for mental health management.

Now blog posting feels less like simply organizing or sharing what I’ve studied, and more like a hobby of “writing.”

I plan to keep steadily writing about one post per week going forward. I think as posts accumulate over several years, they’ll become good memories later.

Leaving a Job I’d Grown Attached to Over 2.5 Years

At the end of August 2019, I left Brave Mobile, where I’d happily worked for the past 2.5 years. I learned a lot experiencing the company grow from just about 10 employees to raising Series A and B funding, and met great colleagues.

Looking back, before joining this company I was a greenhorn developer with less than a year of startup experience and one entrepreneurship attempt. I’d built many unusual things as side projects, but I wasn’t necessarily better at coding than others. I guess you could say it was a time when I found the act of making things more interesting than making things well.

But all the work environments I experienced after graduating college were continuous processes of finding and solving problems myself rather than doing what someone told me to do. So naturally I became comfortable making decisions about problems, and also wasn’t afraid to take responsibility for those decisions.

Early-stage startups always lack human resources and don’t have systems where someone makes every decision for you, so individuals often need to become leaders within their responsibility scope. My experiences fit well with Brave Mobile, which was a small-scale startup at the time, letting me work more enjoyably.

So from early after joining, I made countless decisions holding overall decision-making authority over frontend applications. Some of those were good choices, some weren’t — but either way, these experiences were great nutrients for growth for a greenhorn developer like me.

When I first joined in 2017, the service called Soomgo was a traditional MPA application without even a frontend framework attached. I remember opening the source code for the first time and finding traces of a failed React integration attempt and Vue with just basic scaffolding as boilerplate sitting there.

In other words, my first mission after joining was somehow applying Vue to a Django-written MPA application. At the time, there weren’t many references for using Vue this way, so I remember struggling. (Unfairly, now Googling turns up quite a few references)

As time passed and things got a bit easier, I gradually made the application more solid — building my own SSR server using Express and introducing TypeScript. This process is also one of the quite valuable experiences you can have at an early-stage startup where nothing’s built yet.

Also, since I held decision-making authority over frontend applications, frequent communication with various roles — not just backend developers but designers, POs, marketers — necessarily occurred, and these experiences were also quite fun. Thanks to that, I could learn about what other roles do besides development, and it was an opportunity to think a lot about teamwork.

And since Brave Mobile was an organization that deeply considered efficient agile processes, I got to enjoy the luxury of receiving coaching from a famous agile coach with expensive fees. I summarized what I learned from agile coaching in a post called What Exactly Is This Agile Thing?.

But as time passed, daily work of handling repeated tasks with familiar people continued, and opportunities for new experiences gradually decreased while thirst for growth grew. Also, since the deadline for satisfying the condition “travel abroad alone before my twenties end” on my wish list was exactly this year, I decided to resign after long consideration.

The post I wrote when leaving, Leaving the Company I Worked at for 2 Years, has more details, so check that out if you’re curious.

Living in Prague for a Month

After leaving Brave Mobile, I put into action the dream I’d had since age 20: “traveling abroad alone.” Actually, I haven’t traveled abroad that much, and when I did travel abroad it was always with friends or family. So thinking about leaving Korea alone was a bit scary, but once I booked the plane ticket my resolve suddenly hardened and I completed all reservations in a single day.

And since this wasn’t taking vacation but leaving after quitting my job to travel freely, I didn’t need to set a tight schedule like 4 nights 5 days. I personally don’t prefer travel styles of rushing through tourist spots on tight schedules, so I set this trip’s concept as “living for a month.”

I’d barely been anywhere in Europe except Moscow in my life, so this time I wanted to smell more European air. Since I’d signed a 2-month freelance contract with Brave Mobile after quitting, I searched for destinations based on the condition “Europe but with fast internet.”

While researching, I obtained information that Prague and Budapest had beautiful cities and fast internet for Europe, and ultimately concluded I’d spend a month living in Prague.

The problem was that the only information I knew about Prague was Czech Philharmonic Orchestra and Prague Lovers. My thinking at the time was this:

I’m living there for a month anyway, so I’ll figure it out when I get there haha (happy circuit activated)

Don't activate happy circuits, properly research before going

One thing I seriously missed was the carry-on ban for 2015 15-inch MacBook Pros. At the time there was an issue where you couldn’t bring MacBook Pros on planes depending on each country’s government guidelines or airline safety regulations, following a battery explosion accident in the US. And I missed this.

I accidentally learned about this fact the evening before departure and emailed Czech Airlines to inquire, but since it was the weekend, naturally I received no response by flight time.

Checking the European Aviation Safety Agency homepage showed that the EU’s position was you can carry it on if you just turn off the power during flight, but airline safety regulations differ by airline. Plus I thought if guidelines strengthened more when returning to Korea, I might have to leave the MacBook Pro in Czech Republic. So ultimately I brought my 2009 antique MacBook Pro. (Thanks to which the mac died in Prague and I got it repaired)

Another thing was English didn’t work as well as expected. Czech uses Czech, which feels similar to Russian, but I was careless thinking everyone in Prague would speak English well since it’s so famous as a tourist destination.

But my accommodation wasn’t near tourist areas, so there weren’t as many people who spoke English well as I thought, and I struggled quite a bit communicating. So from now on, when traveling to non-English-speaking countries, I plan to study enough to speak at least basic words and grammar in that country’s language before going.

The information I struggled to obtain in Prague is organized in the post Surviving as a Digital Nomad in Prague.

Meaningful Small Talk Gatherings with Developers

In November 2019, Lubycon — the toy project team I’ve been running with friends since college — held a small talk gathering called Chit Chat.

While developers have more gatherings like conferences and networking compared to other roles, most of these gatherings’ topics focus on technology itself. Since there aren’t many opportunities to officially share individual thoughts or values, I thought it would be nice to have a space for discussing topics outside technology.

That’s why we planned a small talk gathering for sharing stories about soft skills. Various developers of different career levels and different roles gathered and had a great experience sharing individual thoughts about soft skills for two hours.

But since this was the first event I’d ever organized, there were worrying parts. Actually, I’m a bit shy, so I don’t usually participate in networking or conferences frequently. This time I had to take on the moderator role for discussion, which felt burdensome.

But once people gathered and discussion started, everyone passionately shared their opinions, so there wasn’t actually much for me to do as moderator. I just enjoyed the discussion itself and had fun.

If you’re curious what topics and stories we shared at Chit Chat, you can check out the Lubycon 1st Chit Chat Retrospective post on the Lubycon team blog.

A New Beginning

Though I haven’t officially mentioned it through the blog, I joined Viva Republica, which makes the financial service Toss, starting December 9th.

There are various reasons I chose this company, but the biggest reason was thinking the Toss team is “an organization that works enjoyably.”

I haven’t experienced much at this company yet and am just learning things one by one, but I definitely feel the Toss team itself has energetic vibes.

Plus, since there are so many people good at both work and development, I can receive stimulation, which is nice. Recently a Pull Request I submitted got about 20 feedback comments. It’s been a while since someone read my code in this much detail and gave feedback, so it felt good. And it felt reassuring to be making the same product with these people.

Of course, I still have one challenge remaining called 3 Month Review, but I’m not really thinking about it and just trying to do my own work well. Even if I fail, I think I won’t have regrets if I did my best.

Closing My Twenties

2019 was my last twenties, and from next year I enter the path of thirties. When I was young, the age of thirty had this “adult” image to me, but now standing right before thirty and looking at myself, I don’t really feel like I’ve become an adult. Just feels like I aged one more year.

This year I made many attempts and achieved some results. I published a book, lived in Europe for a month, and changed jobs to a new workplace. What’s important is these things weren’t planned from long ago — I just did what I wanted to do at each moment.

Actually, since age 17 I’ve had one principle I pledged to myself: “live doing only what I want to do.” Some people say I’m immature when I say this, and some say understanding compromise with reality is being an adult. But if that’s what being an adult means, I think it’s okay not to become one.

Living doing only what you want doesn’t mean living selfishly. Everyone knows living doing only what you want in reality isn’t easy. Naturally, it requires much accompanying effort.

I loved coding so much I wanted to work as a developer, so I studied hard and became a developer. I wanted to help others using the knowledge I have, so I keep steadily writing blog posts.

I think these small challenges and efforts can gather to create the reality of “definitely do what I want to do.” Well, I can’t guarantee anything since I don’t know what difficult things will come next, but I’ll try to carry this value until I’m in my coffin.

That’s why in 2020, I’m thinking of trying a challenge related to “presentations” or “lectures.” Watching people who present or lecture makes me think they’re amazing, but standing in front of others and saying something is a bit scary, so I’ve kept putting it off. But this year I want to gather courage.

That’s all for this retrospective looking back on 2019, the last of my twenties.