These are the ten important things about Rework Labs in 2016.

1. Total collected revenue remains the same with less than 2% increase.
2. Around 20% of income is from Malaysia this year.
3. 60% income are from the same client, and all applications are for in-house usage.
4. I have built an MVP for a startup on WordPress.
5. I have my first local biz trip to Kuantan.
6. Build web application for a petrol station.
7. A massive e-commerce project in talk for few months, still not confirm.
8. Lost one of recurring maintenance e-commerce website, the site transform into a market place.
9. Propose a profit sharing deal for an e-commerce site.
10. Build an admin package of Laravel for my own usage.

It’s a not so bad year for Rework Labs, but again I miss out to build anything and convert to product biz. I hope 2017 I can finally put a check mark on this goal.

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Checking on my 2016 Resolution, I felt quite regret for a year past and didn’t complete much.

• Work / Product / Life Balance – I did pretty well for Work Life balance, I work lesser during weekend nowadays and spends time with my family. But nothing has been done on the product side.
• Stay Healthy – Have enough sleep, cut down 3-in-1 coffee a lot and went for GYM some time, but weight still the main issue.
• Build Habits – I think this last for four months and I totally lost track.
• Build Something – I thought building product is easy but I totally failure last year, I did a few concept little thing and left it.
• Convert from freelance to product owner – Nope, long way to go.

I still using Trello to track my resolutions and relevant monthly events and it works well, but I don’t have much patient to build up habits.

So these are the memorable things for 2016.

• Family trip to Perth during May, my son first oversea trip.
• Family trip to HK during Oct.
• Kuantan Biz Trip during June, my first local biz trip.
• Melaka Trip during July.
• Staycation on Jan and Oct.
• Bought a new car because our COE is ending soon.
• My son starts going to play group.
• My son first performance on stage.
• Back to World Of Warcraft for three months.
• A new Family Member confirmed.
• Meetup with a bunch of primary school friends.
• A Family Member passes away.
• Kickstart an e-commerce store.

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So what happen on September?

Freelance – complete some of the outstanding projects including a membership register site, rewrite an online voting prototype into Laravel 5.3 app,  completing another membership site with the premium template and upgrade method.

Enquiry – The big project still on talk and since I already meet my sales goal this year, I’m pretty relaxing with this deal. The deal still waiting for approval, if become confirm, of course, it will mark a new sales milestone for myself, even is not a success, I can make use of the time to launch my product.

Learn – Playing with the load balancer, not for load balance purpose, thanks for Linode setup load balancer is easy nowadays.

Product – Thinking on a new idea and hopefully can build up the prototype soon.

My recently free time has been pretty much occupied by World of Warcraft and iFlix, it doesn’t seem very good for productivity, but somehow I feel that I need these to balance out.

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So what happen in July & August?

Freelance – I build a mockup website, working on a Project for the petrol station, implement a new payment gateway to use on Gravity form and start to monitor metrics for an Ecommerce site.

Enquiry – I have one major enquiry last month if the deal is confirmed, I was going to be busy for the next few month, and it will help me to reach the new sales goal.

Learn – I build a Laravel package for my use, it allow me to share some common features among my three ongoing Laravel project. Beside that, I learn how to link a payment gateway to use on Gravity form.

Product – I manage to build a quick prototype for one of my ideal projects, but didn’t have much time to polish it, and I just heard someone might be doing similar project soon, I better get it up and release the version 1.0.

I got few more things to blog about. Hopefully, I can maintain this writing urge and publish a few post soon.

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What’s happen in June?

Freelance – completed two contest site based on WordPress and another two quick mockups based on Laravel.

Enquiry – There are three enquiry incoming, only the tiny one is confirmed.

Internal – migrated all server to Linode since the ram upgrade, it has saved my server cost since I original plan to upgrade the server for more ram.

Compare to June, I have a more excited July, working on a Laravel package and a product mockup currently, I will have more interesting to tell next month.

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So what happen in May ?

Freelance – Live 2 WP site, build a site that combines Lumen with WP and kicks start another Laravel project for a petrol station.

Learn – Combination of Lumen and WP to build an MVP

Internal – since Github release the new pricing, I have migrated back to Github and taken down my Gitlab repo server. I was playing around an email startup call Migadu, which helps for some of my SME customer that don’t want to use Google App for their email service.

It was a short month for me; I was away the last week of the May.  My brother and I with our kids have a short holiday in Perth, the travel experience is entirely different when you go with children, but overall is still an excellent memory.

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In term of family, so far I enjoy the life with my boy, now we have sent him to the nursery group, and we have more time to do our work. It’s still quite packed compared to the time before his born, but at least now is more manageable.

I do hope for adding another new member to the family within this year if possible, but there are so many things happen and really seem a bit tough for us.

For work wise, I m still stuck in freelancing; product business doesn’t start properly, and I do get discourage for the current situation. I did look out for other opportunities too but feel like I should be still doing what I good at. Hopefully the second half of this year, I manage to push forward on my product business.

One of the major things is finally I bought an HDB, after so many years. At least now there is a place for me to rest when I attend any event in SG. Beside this the current car’s COE is expired soon, so going to get a new car this year, the financial pressure is there.

For the past one year might not be the most exciting, but definitely, a lot has been achieved, and I am looking forward next year.

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Instead of install all kind of apps, we just need to talk / command / message the Bot and get it done. It might not be able to replace all kind of app, but I think at least is going to reduce greatly what you need to install.

From www.gupshup.io

I try to make a comparison like this:

• On my desktop, open my browser and navigate to Google Analytics website and after multiple clicks finally I can see the summary of my blog’s traffic.
• On my mobile, open Google Analytics app ( if don’t have you need to install first ), after a few click, finally I can see the summary of my blog’s traffic.
• On my messenger ( FB, Slack or Telegram ), send in a command to request today summary and the bot reply with how my blog performance today.

It’s very clear which are the more straight forward way. Let’s see what will happen on the Bots for the next 12 month.

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Github new pricing does win over the indie developer, but the changes on the Organizations seat is going to chase a lot of users away. The new pricing for Organizations are only good for the small team  ( 5 users and below ), if your team is more than five users, you need to pay more for this price change.

This new pricing changes also affected some of the interesting Github usages for example

1. The company that selling package/software by allow paid user to access the private repo.
2. User that beta their software for beta tester to access the private repo.
3. Bot accounts that hook into repo to provide enhancement.
4. Tech book owner that provide private repo ( code sample etc. ) for their reader.

It seems like whoever decide the pricing changes lost touch with how people are using Github or simply just ignore it and want to earn more money. What’s Github next step ? will it make some modifications on this new pricing changes? Or just push all these users to Gitlab?

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So what happen in April?

Freelance – I been working on the final part of 2 projects and didn’t manage to start a new project in April, delay it to May.

Enquiry – 2 major enquiry from the existing customer, hopefully, can close the deal.

Learn – I been looking into Nodejs , Vuejs and the new product from Laravel – Laravel Spark.

Products – I have built a prototype for one of my ideas, but still struggle how to expand it. I have spending time doing research on bots also and prepare to create prototype for my first bot. I think it might be the next big thing and trying to chat with friends about it to brainstorm more ideas.

Internal – I been busy to replace the transactional email services from Mandrill to Mailgun and replace Github with my Gitlab setup.\

May will be busy for me as well, pack with work, settle the new house, small trip and building of the new product. Hopefully, I can work it out.

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