Let’s Look Back at 2020

A year that had many ups and downs

Lz.
3 min readJan 3, 2021

2020 was a year that will be remembered for a long time. I had a lot of different experiences, opportunities, and growth in those 366 days. The year brought a lot of up and downs, but I am thankful for where it took me. If one year ago you told me that I would that I would be where I am today, I would have thought you were insane. In this short blog post, I am going to recap my year, elaborate on some successes and failures, and share my expectations / goals for the upcoming year.

TimeCrunch & Habite (on the App Store)

Recap

The year started off on a rough patch with not much motivation and barely any work on my apps. I didn’t start doing any actual work on updates for my apps until March when I decided to do a full app rebuild for Habite. What I thought would take me a month, ended up taking me from March until October to ship out v2. With that, I spent most of my summer rewriting all of the code for Habite, as well as making sure it still worked for all past users. Then the rest of the year I spent working on building small apps, rewriting my websites, and starting new projects. Overall the year was more productive toward the end especially when I landed my full stack engineering position! The year may have had a rough start, but it was built up as time went on finishing off very strong.

Successes & Failures

Looking back at 2020, I had a few failures here and then some success there. Habite did not have a great start to 2020 which put it below my goal for the first half of the year. Along with this, TimeCrunch was not too hot for the winter/spring semester as many students had transitioned to virtual courses which made the app not as focused on an in person forum. Overall, the start to 2020 for both my apps was not too great and they were both in failing stages…

One factor that kept me going to change my apps altogether was that I had more time than before because of quarantine. With almost unlimited time, I was determined to bring my apps back to life. Habite specifically needed a revamp, and rebuilding it from the ground up with a new user interface helped change the results at the end of the year. I learned a lot with maintaining applications and building them to appeal to the user. From v1.6 to v2, Habite had a complete face lift which partially helped drive new users! With working on updates most of this year, I was able to build on more of my swift skills. This specifically allowed me to expand my search for an ios engineering position, and with a lot of no-responses to being denied, I was thankfully able to land one! The year had so many ups and downs, but with a lot of hard work and drive, I was able to have more success than fail this year!

Expectations & Goals for 2021

For this upcoming year, I have a few major goals that I am planning to complete. I set out multiple minor goals that will be focused on being completed every 3 months. These minor goals will focus on app updates, progress reports, and have something to do with social media as well. I plan to share these minor goals every week specifically through my instagram and Lz weekly! For the major goals, I will be sharing them every few months and sharing what they were and if I was able to complete them at a given time. My personal expectations will include being more driven to work harder on my side projects and mentally preparing myself instead of dragging things on over time. I plan to launch a few apps this year, and possibly launch some web, android, and macOS apps! 2021 is going to be the biggest year yet for LzCtrl! Happy New Year to all!

If you have any questions or want to reach out, send me a message through my website or my instagram!

Instagram: @Lzctrl (Posting daily content of my work)

Habite: Download for free

TimeCrunch: Download for free

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