Difficult, challenging, and rewarding — 2019 Review

Everything's rolling. Other camera. Okay, 2019 is coming to a close and this is my year in review video. I did one last year and it's pretty cathartic just to kind of review everything that you did. I like to list everything out month by month, go back through like old, old significant tweets or emails or client projects and kids birthdays and kind of major events and look back at everything. So this is a random assortment of all of the major things that happened in 2019. Now this year was probably one of the most difficult years that I've experienced in quite some time. And it was also one of the most rewarding years. So I'll dig into all of what made that the most difficult and most rewarding. So first up, let's start with January. So in January I was still kind of working a little bit with Vincent Lemoine on some of the streamlineicons.com websites, site updates here and there, not too much, but just a little bit. We were also right in the middle of a brand new house renovation the previous month. In December, we bought a brand new house that was like a 60s ranch and decided that we were going to renovate the entire interior. And in true designer OCD fashion, I ended up doing a model of the entire thing inside of Sketchup. And we worked on removing walls and adding a big island, replacing just about everything, vaulting ceilings, did a huge amount of demolition, updated the bathrooms, just a ton and ton of work and ended up taking a lot of time on my behalf. I mean, it was basically a halftime job, part time job for me for probably January through May. We ended up doing it in December and it took us about six months before we were able to move in. So in the meantime, when I wasn't working on that, I was also working on the shift nudge course curriculum. I had been working on this the previous year, but for one reason or another, something just kept coming up and I could never get focused time on that. So in January I started working more on the curriculum and started planning to release that course as soon as I could. But I was also getting some emails from another potential client that could have been a good opportunity. So I decided to continue to pursue that. And also in January, at the very end, my second son, justice started celebrated his ninth birthday. So that was a lot of fun. Okay. In February, shift nudge curriculum is still getting worked on, but I'm also kind of, it is a lot of work, so I'm actively looking for things to procrastinate that amount of work because it was kind of overwhelming with the amount of content that I wanted to put in. So I decided to take my font that I created many years ago actually for another kind of local client was like a cycling company. I turned this font, it was actually a logo typeface and I turned it into a font so they could put it on their, on the, the top tube on their bike so you could have people's names. And I'd been wanting to turn it into a font for a long time and finally release it. So finally I just decided, you know what, I'm going to spend about a week or so and kind of get this thing out here. So if you go to zoom.com you can check out that font. We're also in February, we're still doing our house renovations. Tons of work, tons of demolition. And then I'm also still chugging along, chugging along at the shift nudge curriculum in February and then March rolls around. In March officially signed a contract to work on the Smartline app redesign for GoDaddy. This was a big project and it was going to take up three or four months of time. And coming off January and February, without doing much client work at all, it was a good opportunity for me to kind of reset, get back into the groove of doing design work and actually earning some income. All right, April rolls around and the very, very beginning of April, travel to San Francisco for the smartline kickoff. And basically in April, smartline work is just, that's really all I'm doing. In addition to kind of coming to the new house and checking on renovations, seeing how things are going. Wednesday, April 3, 2019 and it is time for another house update video. May rolls around and I'm still doing smartline. We actually move into our new house in May. Over the course of a week, one of my older clients, Fiberstream, approached me to do some follow up work on their customer portal, their dashboard. And so I had him fly in from Toronto so we could do a week's worth of work in person at my studio at our co working space. It was actually, as it turned out, we weren't planning this, but this was the week we were moving from our old house to our new house. And that was also the week that my client from Toronto was in town for the entire week. So as you can imagine, that was quite a hectic week. Somehow, some way I was able to make it work and we got everything done. We moved in. New house, yay happy client, yay. Also, I just realized that I forgot to add in Shanna and I went to Dan Petty's premiere in Nashville for his Greater Than Avatars film series. Dan, thank you so much for having me be a part of that. It was a lot of fun. You were there. I wanted to put you in it. Well, be prepared. You're in it. I forgot something else. My son Nixon turned five this year. First his birthday in the new house. So we had a lot of fun celebrating him. And how old are you today? Five. No way. Five years old. Did you have a good birthday at school? Did you get to wear the birthday hat? Did they sing Heavy Rotated. And also in the middle of all this, excluding the week for my Toronto client, I'm also still working on finishing all the Smartline designs. June rolls around and we take a very much needed vacation at the beach with my family. And also my one conference travel this year was going to New York to speak at the Dribble Hang time. A really cool, very grateful to Dribble for trusting me to be the opening keynote speaker at that. It was very nerve wracking. But I got through with it. I was happy with how it turned out and it was a, it was a fun time. So the rest of June, I'm also finishing up all the Smartline work, finishing up all those designs. And in July, that's when I kind of finally handed over all of those designs. And also now, now that I'm done with Smartline, I'm working on shift nudge curriculum and, and it's just this big mountain of work that I'm just kind of going through. I'm writing all the lessons, reorganizing the structure of the curriculum and just trying to get this thing off the ground. This is the shift nudge stuff is the most challenging and the largest project that I've ever personally tried to do on my own. So it's just kind of sucking the life out of me. And just as I'm making some good progress on the shift nudge curriculum in July, in August, I get a phone call from my dad and he says, hey, Matt, I'm in the emergency room and my kidneys have failed. And all of a sudden I'm like, okay, what does that mean? Are you gonna be okay? And he was in the hospital for two full months. And so the hospital he's at is probably a two hour drive from where I live. So almost every other day for the first month, I'm driving back and forth, back and forth, checking in on my dad. Some side notes. On the month of August, we celebrated our niche anniversary niche is our co working space. We had a little anniversary party and I also had a mini family reunion with my brother and my sister from California. They flew in to see our dad. My uncle flew in. It was kind of like we didn't know if this was going to be the last time they were able to see him. So it was just, it was nice to see them, but it was a very difficult month. September rolls around, my dad's still in the hospital and I am somehow trying to figure out how to work on this massive personal project while also feeling like my dad could die at any moment. At the end of September, they actually figured out what was wrong with him. They diagnosed him with a rare autoimmune disease called goodpasture syndrome, which is a disease that your body starts to attack your kidneys and your lungs. Once they were able to start treatment for that, he kind of miraculously got better. His kidneys still don't work, so he needs to do dialysis. But praise report End of September, my dad is alive and even though he is on dialysis and he moves back home. So kind of a shocking cap to the end of September, especially when things look so bleak for August and September. And I, I struggle to know how much to share in this video about that whole situation. But I think, you know, and I don't want this video to, to be about, you know, oh, you know, I'm so sad to hear that, Matt. I'm not trying to do it to get attention. I just think it's helpful to know that real people experience real problems and everybody is going through something and you just really never know. So with that being said, October comes around and oh, oh, I need, I need to back up. I need to back up two months back to August. My wife, my lovely, beautiful, loving, my everything. We celebrated her 37th birthday. Happy birthday. Happy birthday. And had a big blast doing that. My oldest son turned 12 years old, so we celebrated him. I love, love, love my family. These are all kind of bittersweet moments in the middle of my dad being sick. But anyway, celebrated those two birthdays. Fast forward to October. I celebrated my 37th birthday and it is very, very odd to be this close to 40 when I don't really feel, you know, in a lot of ways my body is very much a 37 year old, but in a lot of ways I still feel like, you know, the mentality of a child. So it's, it's odd. Interesting. Getting older. October so I' the shift nudge videos. I'm still writing content. I'M getting into like recording implicit grid. This is probably one of the most important. Finally got this like proper setup at my house since. Since it took us a while to move, I wanted to move my recording setup out of the coworking space into my kind of private home studio so I would have quicker access, I could make videos more on demand, and I could have kind of a setup with the background and all this. I'll just kind of give you an idea of what I'm looking at here. So this is where I'm talking. Got a nice light microphone, secondary camera that I put on a Christmas box for now. But yeah, this is like a little extra room in my house that I'm using as my little home studio. And eventually I might make it a little bit different, but for now, this is what it is. This is where I'm recording. Also in October, I decided to make Flokit into a Figma plugin. And Figma announced all of their plugins. And I've really been enjoying Figma as my design tool of choice. So I did some designs, worked through some early concepts, working on that for a month or two. And it was also kind of another one of those things where I really wanted to focus on shift nudge. I wanted to get that out. But it was still. It was almost like I needed to take breaks because it was such a huge project. So I needed to prepare procrastinate that project with a smaller mini project that I knew I could get launched before that, so. And also Sam, Sophus and I were continuing to work on some updates for the contrast app. So we added a little share feature. If you select your colors and you go to the settings icon and you click Share URL. We developed this little website that would use the hex code combination in the URL to generate a shareable page. So you could use this as kind of just a quick contrast checker in the. But you could also share these with coworkers or anyone else that you needed to kind of share accessibility scores with. So that was a fun little quick mini project that we did kind of. Also in October, November rolls around and Flokit 3.0 is finally launched to the world. We've got the plugin in the Figma store, we've got the API built that registers the license codes, everything that needed to happen. So I was really excited about the support and the people who got Flow Kit seem to really enjoy it. And it's always a very good feeling when you know that the thing that you worked on for so Long is paying off and people are getting value out of it. So that was a great little momentum builder for me. So now that I've got Flokit out of the way, I got back to recording the Shift Nudge videos, and I'm editing and I'm. I decided to put the entire Shift Nudge course inside of Notion. I was using Notion to kind of track everything to write the lessons, created multiple pages. And then I was like, well, maybe I could. Maybe I could host the course, at least the beta version inside of Notion, and create that as, like a private workspace, invite people who bought the course into that as a guest so they could comment. And that coupled with the Slack channel. So that was kind of what I was thinking in November, recording the lessons. And then December hits and we celebrated my daughter's eighth birthday. Sweet little Issa. She turned eight. She's our only girl out of four kids. You're both happy and sad with the birthdays because they're growing up and it's a lot different than it was in the past, and it really doesn't last that long. So lovely time celebrating her birthday. All right. And now that the year is coming to a close and I've been working on this freaking video course for so long, I'm working on the lessons and I'm recording and I'm editing and I'm organizing and I'm creating designs and I'm assigning homework and just trying to figure this all out. I decided that I cannot wait any longer to get this in the hands of people to start testing and going through the content. So I decided that I was going to put together a private beta that would be limited to 100 people only if I could even get that many. I wasn't sure how many people would be interested. And I didn't want to spend another three months working on all the videos without testing everything and getting some actual feedback. I truly believe that the content was good. And this is not the first course I've ever created. In total, there's about 80 lessons, and every. Every lesson has about a 20 minute video associated with it. And so it's just. It is an absolute beast of a course. But I didn't want to keep going without getting some testing going. So I decided to launch the private beta to a very small group of people that were already signed up on my email list. And to my absolute amazement, I did have a hundred people sign up for the course. All these students going through the Shift Nudge course, and so far, people have been posting homework. And I've been working, able to upload some critique videos for their designs. And it was just an amazing way to cap off the year. So I feel like after my camera. Camera just died. Let's see if this one's still going. Okay, this one's still going. So I'm going to finish up with this one. So. Yes, it's just, it was just really, really special for me to have people interested in the course and to join. And so now, now that December here, I'm basically working on all of the remaining lessons. I've got about half of it done and half of it to be completed probably in January or so. And we're also celebrating Christmas for the first time in our new house. That's a lot of fun. And we're also working on some exterior plans. We, we remodeled the entire interior, but we didn't really do anything to the exterior. So there's quite a contrast between the old 60s brick ranch that we're in on the outside and then the kind of nice new modern look that we've done on the inside. So we're excited about working on, on that in, in the future for 2020. So speaking of 2020, what's next? Well, I do know for now, based on the interest in the shift notch Beta, I'm going to be working on Shift nudge for the entire first quarter of 2020. So I'm going to be supporting the Beta students that are in the course now. I'm going to be working on, you know, a big public launch probably in like spring of 2020, kind of up in the air. I still need to just do a lot of work to get that off the ground for the public release. Lots of stuff. A dramatic 2019. I wish you a very, very happy 2020. And until next time, I'll see you later.