Happy Last Friday of 2018 and welcome to a completely new concept of newsletter! As the year approaches to an end it is time for some reflection and one of the things I’ve realized is that there isn’t that much value in the newsletter as just a simple collection of latest articles within this blog. So instead, I’m going to try a new approach of weekly handcrafted emails to give you more insight into what I’m working on, what I’m thinking about, what I’m learning… A sort of meta-barbarian-meets-coding where you can find out more about what goes behind the scenes. You’ll also be able to find past newsletter editions within my blog.

As I do every year I’ve started doing my yearly retrospective where I go over the things I’ve achieved and am proud of over a year, areas where I dropped the ball and what I’m planning and looking forward in the year to come. It isn’t ready yet, but here are some of the highlights I’m planning to include:

• This year my biggest focus has been being a dad for my son Teo and a good partner for my wife Malin. I’ve been on parental leave from July onwards and it’s been amazing to be able to spend so much real quality time getting to know my son. Sweden and Google both rock in this regard.
• This is the year I went back to being a full time software developer. Last April I became a Software Engineer at Google and I’m still ecstatic about it (talk about dreams coming true). I’m so happy to be focusing full time in Software Development again.
• Last August I participated in my first game jam and wrote a game in under 13 Kb of JavaScript. That was a ton of fun and I wholeheartedly recommend it.
• I’ve been investing a lot of time (most of my dad free time in fact) in improving my vim skills. It is such an amazing editor, in both concept and in practice. I’ve been sharing my explorations here in my blog.
• I did some introspection about my experience interviewing for big tech companies like Amazon and Google. You may find it useful if you’re planning to join any of these companies yourself and are looking for some guidance or support when preparing for the interviews.
• I’ve been spending a lot of time introspecting about where I’m investing my precious time. As most of my time is devoted to Teo it turns out that there’s not much of it left. I wrote a couple of articles on how to get your time back and also about how to find time for coding when you have children.
• I’ve started redesigning Barbarian Meets Coding and I think it’s going very well. I love the new design. It’s a blend of fantasy-comic-meets-coding-and-pixel-art. If you haven’t visited in a while then take a look and tell me what you think.
• I also learnt to do pixel art properly. That was really, really cool. It was so refreshing and empowering to be able to create pixel art I was happy with. I really surprised myself with this one. Looking forward to doing more pixel art in the near future and keep getting better at it.

In addition to these highlights, here are some interesting things I’ve been perusing and thinking about this week:

• I recently discovered the Command Line Heroes podcast and I’m really enjoying it. I think it is a really special podcast. Probably the best Software Development podcast I’ve listened to since This Developer’s Life. Check it out if you haven’t already ‘cause I think you’ll enjoy it too.
• I’ve started writing a book about Vim. The draft title of the book is Wizards Use Vim: A JavaScript-mancy Side-Quest and it’s going to be awesome. And weird. The book is going to be a sort of prequel to the JavaScript-mancy series (if a book of vim can be a prequel to a book on JavaScript) and enrich the JavaScript-mancy universe at the same time as it enpowers your text editing skills. It’s going to be a short book, an introduction to Vim that will serve as a warm up to come back to the JavaScript-mancy series and the next book on functional programming (when I procrastinate, I procrastinate the shit out of procrastrinating).
• I’ve been enjoying the blog redesign a lot. I moved my blog to Gatsby a while back and working with react and graphql within the confines of Gatsby is a reeeeally nice development experience. If you haven’t checked it out yet then consider doing so.
• Kingdom Rush Vengeance is reminding me how fun it’s to play video games. I love video games but I can rarely find time to play these days. Some times is good to make some time, grab a good game and relax. I feel energized and inspired by well made games. It’s feels to me like craftsmanship is contagious.

Happy New Year 2019! Hope you have a wonderful year ahead of you! Take care! And let me know what you think about the new newsletter format.