It’s time to kick off the awards for best (or most used, reintroduced etc.) software, books, movies, and music. This year will be remembered as the one where we thought Covid was gone but came back in full force with its omicron hybrid. Anyways, some best-of deserve to be mentioned regardless!
Software
Bootstrap 4 - Wow, that’s old! Yeah, but it’s a mature gem. I spent three months rewriting my biggest web app this fall using BS4, and I am really happy with the result and what BS4 brought to the table. The biggest difference from BS3 is that its main building blocks are flexbox-based. This causes alignment, positioning and other responsive functionality so much easier using inline classes. So far I’ve refactored a huge codebase, and hardly any overrides of the standard classes were necessary. Favorite classes are the fixed padding sets, margins, and flexbox basics like justify-content-around to give an example.
Kramdown - is a free MIT-licensed Ruby library for parsing and converting a superset of Markdown. As I am still highly interested in Ruby-based static site generators, this tool makes important stuff easier. Will most likely be used a lot in 2022.
Tayasui - A painting tool for macOS and iOs. As previously being a Photoshop painter, I’ve always felt that something was not a bit off with the brushes. Gradients and overlapping strokes did not feel natural, and I felt I was in a constant brush battle. After trying Tayasui, and especially the aquarelle tool I knew this was a winner.
Some of the apps/frameworks I use daily have stuck with me for years now. This makes it harder and harder to mention new titles in these posts. As I don’t feel I can mention the same apps in multiple ‘Best of’ posts, I still want to list them. They are RubyMine, Ruby on Rails, Jekyll, Bridgetown, Forestry.io, Netlify, Heroku, Discord, Dota2, Steam to mention a few.
Books
I spent the first half of 2021 on paternity leave so I read a lot. I believe I completed my Goodreads challenge (fifteen books) around summertime. As of 27th December, I read nineteen. Let’s list the ones that made the most impact:
Anthony Bordain - Kitchen confidential
Donald Miller - Building a Story Brand
Patrick Rothfuss - Name of the Wind
Morgan Housel - The Psychology of Money
Ken Williams - Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings: The rise and fall of Sierra On-Line
Movies or Tv shows
The Personal History of David Copperfield
Other
Simon Sarris (website, general great inspiration)
Extraordinary event
We bought our first house. It was originally built in 1947, meaning there’s a lot of work to be done. As expected, I’ve spent a lot of effort trying to figure out what to do and figuring out how it should be done. So far, I’ve learned a lot about how things work in an old house. Examples? How to make a lawn look good. How to get the moisture levels to a respectable level in a basement. How to keep it warm in the winter. How to enjoy all seasons in a garden. And more.
Rock on 2022! 🤘