2014 was a pretty intense year of reading, learning, designing and writing code. I moved to Kreuzberg and started freelancing full-time as a designer and developer. Suddenly I was my own accountant, project-manager, lawyer, sales-person, and support-contact. Learning all those things next to my core business was way more time-consuming than I thought first. Nevertheless, freedom compensates all these efforts.

I’m proud that I could layout and art-direct a whole book, worked on the website of a pretty lovely eCommerce shop and developed sites for one, two talented German actors.

During the year I recognized a sharp shift from designing to coding. I improved in front-end matters, WordPress, and other systems. Becoming a full-stack developer seems not to be out of sight anymore.

In 2015, I want to push some self-initiated projects forward, experiment a little more and blog about it. I have to remind myself to photograph more the city I live in and the stories not been told yet.

As a freelancer, you learn the importance of efficiency. Efficiency comes through focus, knowledge, automation, and outsourcing – things I have to work on the next year and are expected to be part of my whole career.

Apart from working, I enjoyed my new neighborhood which is a perfect mix of the big city trouble and village kind-of peace. After a long time, I started playing soccer again and enjoyed the compensation for sitting all day in front of a screen. I enjoyed Venice for a couple of days and was astonished by what humans are able to build.

Music has always accompanied my work, but this year I can not name any particular artist or LP which I recognized or listened to the most. I heard a lot of 80s, rap, bass music and everything around the Soulection cosmos, which has always been a very inspirational source.

The movie of 2014 for me was surprisingly a Marvel movie: Guardians of the Galaxy was the funniest and entertaining movie I’ve seen in a long time. I also found joy in watching short films – mostly on Vimeo: I recommend Wanderers, a visually stunning interstellar clip and another one which I won’t describe as it would contain spoilers. Just watch “The Landing“.

When it comes to reading, I found inspiring pieces via Medium. The platform unites ambitious authors and readers in a way that was never done before. The most memorizable stories for me in 2014 were about the loss of a $50.000 Twitter handle and one with the title: „My Dad got on a plane to New York at 7 am on September 11, 2001“. Both stories are narrative masterpieces.

In 2015 I expect to work even more as I need to level-up like everybody else. Therefore I have to take on new challenges, optimize my workflow, learn and read a lot, try new things, fail and fail even greater to succeed in the long run. I expect the year to be a tough and fast one, but I am looking forward to exciting new projects, new friends, new clients, new music, new stories and new inspiration.

Happy holidays y’all.