Almost everyone have something to talk about 2020. What a year! It’s definitely a year that we will tell to our children and grandchildren as bed time stories. But this won’t be a story of how the Covid-19 shake the world. Rather it will be short summary of important events in my life this year.
Meeting with Jibble Product Team
Well, that’s actually an event of December 2019. Since the motivation and all the funny moments of that event have effected the whole 2020, I need to mention it.
Jibble yearly event(also the first one) took place in Istanbul. It was a great one week long event. Because Jibble is a fully remote company, most of us met with each other for the first time in a physical world. We worked, planned upcoming year, made decisions on new products to develop and of course had a lot of fun. Oh, no need to mention that we ate a lot!
Looking back now, I’m so grateful that we had that event and created memories to remember. If Covid-19 was not exists, we might be having second one around this time of the year.
Jibble 2.0
I was working on a good product. Especially after it’s redesign in 2019, it became much more appealing. We were in fast growth stage. Earning new users everyday. Adding new features almost every two weeks. And I was enjoying to work on it.
Since we are a team that always look for better, we decided that we can make this experience much better than it is now. An app that will have much more features, more user friendly, new and unified design language for the whole brand, up to date technology(sometimes cutting edge technologies) stack.
We doubled the mobile, web frontend and backend teams. Amazing new colleagues joined our team. Worked hard to accomplish our goals. It was not easy. Faced a lot of challenges. But we were sure that this will be a product that will give rocket speed to our growth. I think this gave us the motivation to continue no matter how hard it is.
Soon it will be publicly available. Even if I’m no longer part of the team anymore, I’m so proud and excited to be part of this journey.
Covid-19
This is the topic that I don’t want to talk about too much. Worst thing of the year. Many people died. Many people effected by its impacts on the economy. Some lost their jobs. Quarantines (still writing this from a weekend quarantine), breathing under a mask and living with the fear of getting infected. These are enough reasons to make this year a terrible year.
I’m thankful that I already had a job that runs entirely remote. No need to commute in crowds or working in offices. But even though, me and my wife got infected by Covid-19. In November this year, we went for a PCR test after showing some symptoms. And the result was positive.
Either I got it from a coffee shop I go bi-weekly or my wife got the virus from the factory where she work. We don’t know how but we stayed in quarantine, took our medicine and thankfully all the symptoms stopped after one week. In anyway, it was a bad experience. All the muscle pain, fever and other small symptoms are things that I don’t want experience again.
Family
This year made me cry few times. My grandma died at the beginning of the year. I miss her a lot. Then losing my cousin’s father due to cancer was second emotional shock to me. 2020 will never be a good year to remember.
Travel
I realized that there is no title in this post that I can talk without mentioning about the Covid. It’s the trending topic of the year, right?
Me and my wife really love traveling. Almost each year, we were traveling to at least three different countries. Plus having great summer vacations here in Turkey. Like every citizen of the planet Earth, we stuck with local traveling this year. At the beginning of the year, we had plans to visit Japan, Portugal and Sweden. In fact we bought our flight tickets to Sweden but then all the flights cancelled.
Instead we had two amazing summer trips here in Turkey. First one was at the beginning of June. We planned it like half remote work and half holiday experience. So I was with my laptop. I enjoyed working by the beach and in front of our hotel swimming pool. First stop was Alaçatı. Then we moved to Bodrum. And finally ended our holiday in Kaş. There were not much people or tourists due to restrictions. Thus it was a quite and isolated holiday.
Second part of our summer holiday was in September. This time we headed to Adrasan/Çıralı first. It was our first time to visit this part of the Turkey. Honestly fell in love by its nature. Long and inhabitant beaches, forests behind, it was marvelous. We had an amazing boat tour with my wife on her birthday. Visited beautiful coasts of Adrasan. I wish we visit again some day in the future.
We ended our vacation in Kaş. This is the second time we visit this place in 2020. I admit, we really love Kaş.
And of course I have to mention about amazing balloon experience we had in Cappadocia. We woke up very early, it was cold but I can honestly say it worth all of it. Watching that peaceful landscape from 1000 meters high was breathtaking. I will definitely try again.
Moving to Amsterdam
Not everything is sad or terribly bad this year. Exciting times ahead for our small family. We decided to move Europe and our next home will be in Amsterdam!
After almost 3 wonderful years and working with great people on exciting products, I’m leaving Jibble. And I’m joining Backbase as a Senior Android Engineer.
If everything goes well, we will relocate to Amsterdam at the beginning of 2021. This is so exciting and we are curious what the life holds for us in the upcoming years.
Thanks for reading!
Can Uludag 