The previous report for 2018 can be found here…

A word, that could describe this year, is “treatment”. A year ago I got worse. It was an exacerbation of one of my diseases. For several months I could not work even two hours a day. So, I had to stop all the projects, which did not bring in income. These included #MyTizenMobileApp and #MyNotStartupProject. Now, I’m getting better, but still not fully recovered. And, I’m still not sure, if I’ll ever will be, unfortunately. So, some my projects — free and prospective ones — are on hold for now. Certainly, this makes this year another failure and raises the question, if it makes sense to write and publish further personal reports. So, quite possibly, this is the last one. Anyway…

Achievements in 2019

My work for That Company continues to deliver outcomes for the community — during this year the company open-sourced three new Redmine plugins, that I wrote for them:

• The biggest and the most complicated one is That Meeting. This plugin converts Redmine issues (of the selected trackers) into iCalendar events. If the meeting functionality is enabled for the tracker, the issue gets additional attributes: the start time, the end time, the recurrence type (daily, weekly, monthly or yearly), other recurrence settings allowing to repeat the event, e.g., on every last Thursday, the interval, the number of times to repeat or when to end repeating — same fields, that are available for events in other major calendar software. Email notifications for event issues come with ICS files what makes them be treated as events in emails clients supporting iCalendar, such as Google Mail and Thunderbird. In this way, users can import such events into their calendars and respond to the event invitations. Their responses are sent back to and handled by Redmine, so other attendees can see, who is going to attend the meeting. In other words, That Meeting plugin allows to manage events using Redmine. Remember, this great feature has been requested and brought to you by That Company (Ty Roden). So, don’t forget to thank them, if you find it useful.
• That Resent Notification plugin, as it comes from the name, allows to repeat email notifications. This can be useful, when, e.g., you forgot to add some people to the issue, but want them to be notified about some of the previously made changes along with others. Currently, this feature is available only for issues and administrators. A disadvantage is that it resends notifications to all the users, not only to the newly added ones (we still think, how to fix this). So, it’s a kind of experimental (can be considered so).
• You might have noticed, that it’s impossible to upload more than 10 files at once in Redmine (a known issue)? That’s because there is a hard-coded limit in 10 files. Already two of my customers faced this limit and asked me to do something about it. That Company was the first one. So, after having fixed this, I suggested to open-source it and Ty Roden agreed. That’s how you get That Attachments Limit — the plugin, which allows to change this limit (I already installed it for the other customer).

Unfortunately, none of these plugins support the recent Redmine 4, for now. But, this is one of the very next items in my To-Do list.

• During this year I also learned a couple of new technologies. The most interesting one is Snap.svg — a JavaScript library, that allows to build complicated interactive web applications using SVG. With this library I developed a beautiful pseudo-3D tool, which, unfortunately, is not yet available for public. The project is on hold now. So, I can’t show it.

Other things, which may sound like achievements (sorry, I don’t have better ones this year):

• I was able to get a stable income and constantly a lot of work during this year (thanks to itratos, mostly). I’m still a top rated freelancer on Upwork with 100% job success score. And, I continue to get new customers from time to time.
• During this year I worked on my health issues more seriously (that’s why it can be called a “treatment”). Now, I know much more about them. And, I feel much better, than a year ago. But, I’m still not good enough and will, probably, need more years to get some acceptable result.

Failures in 2019

My failures are still the same, year by year:

• Due to the health issues I had to postpone #MyNotStartupProject again. I started to work on it, but do not have enough time and health to continue.
• Same with #MyTizenMobileApp. Time management is no longer the main issue, why I can’t work on #MyNotStartupProject.
• My Redmine plugins are all on hold for now too, sorry.