As I mentioned in the monthly review for November, which just went online yesterday, I am catching up with these reviews now before, hopefully, getting back into the routine from next month onwards.
So let's have a look at the last month of the previous year:
Accomplishments
My cooperation with BlazeMeter continues, and I wrote Designing APIs with Apicurio Studio for them.
I also published a post about API the Docs Amsterdam on the CloudObjects blog. I'll talk a bit about this event I attended in December in the "Highlights" section below.
Highlights
At the beginning of the month, I traveled to Amsterdam, to attend the API the Docs one-day conference on 4th December. I haven't been to any event like this for a long time, and I have never traveled to Amsterdam before, so this was a definite highlight. Regarding the content and atmosphere of the event itself let me refer to my other blog post once again. As it was a full day event and travel by train from my location to Amsterdam wasn't possible on the same day I had to spend two nights in a hotel. Therefore I decided to make the most of it and arrive early on the previous day and leave late on the day after so I have plenty of time to explore the city. While I was prepared to do that kind of exploration alone, I asked on the Meetup page for the event whether anybody wants to join, and I got a reply and made plans to meet with one other participant on the evening before the conference. The funny thing that happened next is that I randomly bumped into that person on the train station in Cologne so we could already spend the incoming trip together. If that wasn't enough coincidence, we also realized we had booked the same hotel. We spend the day together exploring Amsterdam (here's one typical tourist photo he took of me) and also met with one of the speakers in a pub later that night. I also met a few more interesting and friendly people at the conference and the after party, so, all in all, it was an excellent trip.
The rest of the month was a very typical December. I celebrated my birthday and new year's eve with friends and Christmas was the usual family time with nothing extraordinary to report.
Productivity
Here are the numbers from RescueTime, based on 149h 42m of logged screen time:
- 24% Social Networking (up by 7 points from 17% last month)
- 21% Software Development (down by 3 points from 24% last month)
- 11% Business
- 9% News & Opinion
- 8% Communication & Scheduling
In focus booster I recorded a total productive time of 59h 50 min. Holiday season and travels have taken their toll on my productivity, but that is not unexpected.
Mood
My average daily mood, as tracked in Exist, was 3.82, higher than last month and close to the all-time high of 3.83 in September. In fact, it's the same value as in July up to the 13th digit behind the comma. I have no theory to explain that.
Entertainment and Media
Sadly Star Trek: Discovery was on its Winter break. I watched a couple of older Star Trek episodes from various shows instead, focusing on Enterprise.
Final Remarks
Similar to the November review, I've skipped a few sections for which I don't have or cannot reconstruct the data or where I feel it doesn't make sense to include them.