So. 2020 is over. That uh…. that could have gone better.

I honestly have no idea what to say about this year. It sucked. It sucked for me personally on a huge number of levels, and I don’t think many others would say anything different.

I went into 2020 with a huge amount of excitement. After 5 months of interviews in 2019, I had received hiring approval for an engineering role at Google Tokyo. In preparation, in order to detach from my time at Mercari, I decided to resign at the end of the year to take a bit of a sabbatical where I could relax and catch up on my side projects.

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For a year that felt like time was dragging on forever, this certainly arrived a lot more quickly than I thought. I turned 34. Crazy. XD

Like I joked with a lot of my buddies on the day, I feel like I want a do-over for being 33. I want my money back. XD

All jokes aside, this year was an absolutely surreal event. If I told myself this time last year what would be happening now, I absolutely would not have believed it.

At this point, everything I had planned back in January 2020 has fallen through. I left Tokyo and got stuck out of Japan, Google Tokyo rescinded my job offer, and in the chaos, all my side project plans fell to the wayside while I had to figure out what I was going to do for 2021.

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I just got two notices from Apple. One was letting me know that my blog was back up on Apple News, and then that if I didn’t post anything new, it would get taken down from Apple News.

It was at this moment that I remembered I had a blog. 😅

So, it’s been a while! I hope everyone’s been doing really well. As well as is possible in the circumstances. A lot’s happened this year, hasn’t it.

My last post on this thing was at the start of this year. Back before the craziness started. It feels like I wrote that post in another life at this point. I figured I’d do a quick update on where I’m at and what I’m up to. Things certainly didn’t go the way I had planned this year. Not at all.

If you want a TL;DR: Nothing went to plan this year lol. As such, I didn’t get anywhere as much work on iComics 2 done as I wanted. But things are finally back on track, and I couldn’t be happier. 😀

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Hi everyone! Happy New Year! I hope you had a fantastic start to this decade. I’m extremely excited at all the potential in 2020, and I hope you are too.

I was doing a little reflecting recently and I came to a bit of a scary realisation. I’ve been hacking away on iComics, my little comic reader app for nearly 10 years now.

It was 2010 when I bought the very first iPad. I was so impressed at the potential it brought to the table. A full-colour, high-powered computer screen shaped like a normal piece of paper. Compared to laptops and PCs, it could be comfortably held and operated at any angle; an absolute game-changer when it came to reading comic books.

Having decided my niche would be a DRM-free comic reader, in December 2011, I started working on a proof-of-concept of the app to see if it was possible. At the start of 2012, I announced my intention to build a comic reader app, and launched the first version in late 2012.

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And just like that, 2019 is over, and with it, the 2010s (The Tennies? Tens? Tenties?) are also over. Blimey.

What an insane ride it’s been, both this year, and the last decade. So much has happened, so much has changed. So many good things, and also a couple of bad things.

Reflecting on 2019, this one was definitely an extremely tough one for me. Maybe even the toughest.

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If the amount of time between blogs has been any indication, this has been one absolutely crazy year. Before I knew it, 2019 is already practically gone and I just turned 33. Absolutely crazy!

While my parents came to visit last time, I was expecting this one to be really quiet. Maybe a nice dinner with friends, but not even any cake.

But my crazy and lovely coworkers had other plans. XD

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