January 2021 Life update

Given that we’re only one month into the year, 2021 has been pretty hectic already.

For some context, about 18 months ago I moved from the UK to Munich. I’d lived in Munich before for my work placement as part of my degree, and once I’d returned I think I thought I’d always want to move back at some point, even if only for a few months.

At the beginning of 2019, with a gentle nudge from my Grandma (she told me that when she was a kid, the biggest adventure she could go on was a weekend trip to Scarborough, so I should stop overthinking it and just move), I decided to move to Munich.

In September 2019 I packed up my rucksack and a suitcase and made the move. I arrived at the end of the summer so caught a couple of weeks of sun before the winter started to set in. The following 6 months were spent finding my feet in a new but familiar city, meeting new people and trying new sports and activities. But by March, we were in lockdown. The next 10 months or so were spent going in and out of lockdowns with varying restrictions; I had to cancel travel plans, couldn’t meet friends or explore the city, and with the uncertainty of when I’d be able to visit the UK again to see family, it just started to make less and less sense for me to stay in Munich.

At the beginning of December I decided it was time for me to call it a day and move back to the UK. I spent most of January figuring out the logistics of moving from Germany to Wales in a post-brexit, COVID filled world with constantly changing restrictions not doing my stress levels any favours at all.

18 hours and 4 trains later (yes I took the train the whole way from Munich and yes I would recommend it, it’s super chill) I arrived back at my parents house in south Wales. At the point of writing, 1 of my 8 boxes of belongings has arrived with 2 currently stuck in Cologne, 4 stuck at the UK border due to 'Brexit related disruptions' and 1 that’s been returned to my old apartment

So quite a lot of change this month, hopefully February is just a little more relaxed

Work

My focus has been a bit all over the place for the past couple of weeks but nonetheless the new year is off to a good start so far. I’ve been doing a much better job of organising my day and keeping myself motivated and on-task by setting myself a realistic to-do list each day - shoutout to Todoist!

This month I’ve been working on our Alerts feature - it’s an area of the app that hasn’t had any love for a long time and as we’re adding more features that trigger alerts, I wanted to revisit how they’re managed. This is an area we’ll be building out over the coming months, so the first step for now was a quick UI/UX pass to declutter the pages and make their design more consistent with the rest of the app

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I’ve also been looking at our integrations and how our users go about setting them up. I’ve done several product demos and support calls over the past couple of months and when I’ve been talking through our integrations, on several occasions people have said 'What’s Slack?' or 'I’ve not heard of Eventbrite' or 'What does a Mailchimp integration do?'. So out of this we’ve reviewed each of the pages for all of our integrations, making sure that the UI is consistent with the rest of the app, but more importantly focussing on the copy we use. I wanted to make sure we explain what the app is and what it offers, and then what the benefit is of activating our integration.

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Some things I’ve been enjoying

So those are my updates for the month. Just for fun, here’s a few things I’ve discovered or that I’ve been enjoying this month

This Spotify playlist has been great for focussed work sessions - Vibes 2021 from Steve Schoger

POST HUMAN: SURVIVAL HORROR by Bring Me The Horizon has been my go-to workout album

Dear Maria, Count Me In by All Time Low has been trending on TikTok which has been sending me down a nostalgic rabbit hole of songs from my school years

I’m hooked on Wandavision on Disney+ No clue what’s going on, but loving it!

Shiey’s train-surfing, urban exploration videos on YouTube are strangely absorbing and great for some background noise or something to play on an external monitor whilst you "work"

I set myself the goal this year to publish monthly updates for the whole year, and here’s my first one 🎉 How’s your start to the year been? What have you been enjoying this month? Tweet me or send me a DM @Marsh931. Until next month, hope to see you then!

Alex