2014 is over now and as in the past year I want to recap the past year and reflect what happened.

Note: This is a personal article and there’s at least no technical take away in here.

2014 started with a big change. In December 2013 I said ‘yes’ to my biggest project yet in my career and I started January, 6th, in my new team. This included moving from Munich to Cologne for what I thought would last six month and took out 9.5 months. For me this was a tough decision as my girlfriend, my friends and my beloved mountains stayed in Munich. Nevertheless as it’s only planned for half a year and the opportunity was great, I decided to do this step and it was absolutely right. I had the chance to work with my friend Hans to build a super large-scale front end infrastructure at Vaillant and met a lot of amazing developers, managers, other people and with a lot of them, I became friends. I learned a lot about scalability, maintainability and working together as people in larger teams.

In fact, I really enjoyed the new city. Cologne is a beautiful, nice city with a lot of small coffee roasters, and other independent shops. It also has a lot of nice bars and people to meet. When I went to the park once to enjoy the sun, I stumbled over some slackliners and I became friends with them immediately. From that sunny and warm day in March I went slacklining every possible weekend, improving my personal skills a lot (previously I could walk around 25m, now I’m walking 50m and tried to walk even longer lines around 100 meters).

Work-wise I learned how to scale a front-end architecture to drive dozens of websites later on, build a toolchain around it and how to build it rock-solid with more than ten people working on the code-base. Together with Hans we built our own tools, scripts, decoupled tools from each other and came up with a very stable architecture that works for everyone in the team. I met a lot of great friends in this project and hope we’ll stay in contact in the future.