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It has been a long year. well it was one year long but as they say everything is relative and as such it felt much longer to me. One area which helped to distort the objectivity of time was definitely related to politics. I don't want to utter any political leanings here but I believe that regardless of which side you are on that the constant daily attacks on constitutional and presidential norms has taken its toll on the US populus and likely many, many people around the world. Another area for me was related to my nine to five work, which is also something I do not usually talk about. However this year has seen a sea of change at our mid-size company where after going through 4 managers, the only constant seemed to be change and re-order ( Aka chaos ). I have come to believe that this is what will happen to any company when you replace your leaders with managers but that is for another post.

Now to the pleasant things of 2018

2018 has been the year where my family traveled to Europe together for the first time in 14 years. For my younger son it was the first time in his life, and the older one last saw Europe when he was a mere 6 months old. Ah memories. Our trip started in Paris on June 19'th, when through Kelkheim, Germany where I grew up ( close to Frankfurt Main ) and then continued down south to the Cote d'Azures Nice, Monaco for a brief two days. We then continued along the southern part of France where we spent a few days in Château des Ducs de Joyeuse before we ended up in Toulouse for a week.

Toulouse is where the older one was born while I was working there in the early 2000's, so it was very nice to be back there and re-discover the area. A lot has changed in Toulouse in the past 14 years and a lot has remained the same. [dimage attachment_id="1564" control=true auto-rotate=true anim_speed="0.2" zoom_level="50" position="450.0" start_lon="180.0" start_lat="30"] We returned back to Paris only to stay the last night close to the airport before returning July 10th.

There is an app for that

I have also started to take my apps a bit more serious and developed a whole bunch of new ones. I also bought a set of apps from Flippa, and became obsessed with ASO, SEO, Marketing methods, AdWord campaigns and so forth. I think this year I may tip my toes into the Apple Store with a port of one of my Android apps. On average there is still about two times as much money to be made on the apple store as compared to the google play store. Apps are an interesting area, as some of the apps I put on the market were exceeding my expectations and most of the apps were underperforming from how they should have performed. I though that the time and money I invested in Reverse Video Magic would perform very well but it flopped on me. On the other side I had MP4 Video Converter was doing better than I could expect.

My current focus is on CPU Information which I would love to drive through a million downloads and more. Obviously I am very excited about the app and I am willing to spend time and resources in improving it. We shall see how far I can push this app along the way from a technical, marketing, ads, and social marketing point of view. I would really like to develop another app which is backed by some sort of funny AI Chatbot. This is a project I have had in my head for the past decade or so. We shall see if I can put it all together on the backend. The apps itself will not be the problem. There are so many possible smaller or larger projects I have in mind that it would require a full time commitment from my side to provide all of them onto the app store. My plan for this year is to do more on the Marketing and Social media front. I think if I can get this to the point where I earn enough organic downloads to replace most of my paid advertisement it could be very beneficial to my side hustle.

Screw Fiverr

As I mentioned before I got viciously removed from Fiverr for not breaking any Terms Of Service from either Fiverr or from any other company. The issue has left me be-dazzled as I was helpless in getting banned from a platform I have been using for years without any cause, just because Fiverr felt like it. I hate companies which bully their customers and I am certain Fiverr will vanish if they continue doing this kind of random, self destroying thing, as they have been doing to many users before and certainly will do to many users after. History is plastered with plenty of examples of companies ignoring or attacking their customers. None of those are around anymore.

Wow what the ...

So 2018 is over and we are about to embark onto 2019. This year is going to be a great year. I feel it in my bones. I have a lot of things I want to accomplish this year. I am looking forward in looking back on 2019 and see all the things that will have happened by then. Though let's take it one step at a time and enjoy the journey from now to then.

Posted from my blog with SteemPress : http://www.softwaresamurai.org/2019/01/01/2019-is-going-to-be-a-great-year/