Summary of 2021

One of my regular rituals is to recap the previous year. Why do I do it? In order to think through my vision for the next year, I first need to take stock of the previous year. In this article, I'll summarize how I moved forward professionally and personally in 2021, what I learned, and where I traveled.

For a summary of 2020 see earlier article.

Goals for 2021

• Travel: around the country, to Slovakia and abroad.
• Gain new customers.
• Learn something new for personal use and for work.
• Meet new interesting people.

What I learned

• I learned about other features of the nginx web server.
• I tried out the programming language RUST, which has great potential and is already making significant inroads.
• I worked with the Shoptet API.
• For the btrfs file system, I studied quotes and started actively using them.
• On the professional social network LinkedIn, I started using events.
• I started using the virtualization tool proxmox and tried various experiments with it.
• I tried the pfsense and opensense distributions, which serve as a Linux firewall.
• I have been introduced to the new Linux firewall nftables. For more, see nf_tables root.com.
• A new version of Debian has been released, so I have tried Debian version 11 and am already running it on new machines.
• I often use the web framework Nette, so I have expanded my knowledge with more and new extension components.
• I have tried HTTP2 and made it work for Apache2 and Nginx
web servers.
• I got more familiar with the JavaScript framework SvelteJS and started using it slightly in some projects.
• I learned how to skateboard, longboard to be exact.
• I was into swimming especially crawl and character.
• I started actively trying to use TikTok

Travel

As I expected covid and corona politics went on. So I was not surprised that things were not returning to normal. And since I already had my cooperation set up remote before the corona, it was no problem for me to work in 2021 either . I've had plenty of job offers that required occasional commuting to the office, but those, given the Corona situation, I flat out refused. Working these days for a company that needs office commuting is extremely bad choice.

Although Corona politics has greatly reduced and made travel difficult, I have instead traveled more. In fact, I have been focusing more on traveling as well. One should not be limited by obstacles, especially those that are, artificially and unnecessarily created. Whoever travels in such a situation gains much more and is thus at an advantage.

At the beginning of the summer, my traveling consisted mainly of camping over the weekend. Then I alternated between staying home for a week and camping for a week. And then I'd be on the road with work for up to a fortnight.
In the middle of July, I set off towards Pilsen and Sumava and then turned around via Moravia to Slovakia, where I stayed for most of August. At the end of November, I headed to the Canary Islands to Las Palmas, where I spent December and from where I am writing this summary of 2021. Las Palmas is in Spain and there are good places to eat everywhere.

Details of my Las Palmas stay can be found in a separate article Finding Las Palmas.

Places

What places have I visited? I've travelled almost all over the Czech Republic, all over Slovakia and got as far as Poland and Hungary. And at the end of the year I moved to the Canary Islands to the city of Las Palmas.

Here's a brief list of the bowls I've been to:

• Orlické Hory
• Czech Switzerland
• Usti nad Labem
• CHKO České středohoří
• In Prague, where I used to ride my bike
• Posázaví
• Plzeň region - the village of Stříbro
• Sumava
• Znojemsko
• South Moravia: Mikulov, Valtice, Hodonín
• Slovakia
• Iron Mountains
• Las Palmas

Of course, I also have a GPS record of most of the places, so you and I can see the places in retrospect. Route record:

• Biking and Walking Tours 2021,
• GPS Slovakia
• Las Palmas:

I spent a longer period of time near Pilsen near the town of Stříbro. There were good conditions for cycling and swimming and the weather was good. I saw beautiful places in Czech Switzerland and there was a wonderful reservoir to swim in near Ústí nad Labem. When I was in Sumava I went through all the famous places like Kvilda, Modrava, Poledník, where there is a lookout tower. I got to the source of the Vltava River. I lightly recalled that I had been to these places for a sports camp as part of my undergraduate studies at the CTU.

I went all the way around Slovakia. I've been as far south as Hungary and cycled all the way to Hungary. In the east, I went as far as Michalovce and at the Žemplínská šírava reservoir. And then I rode back between the Slovak mountains.
Photo of the guard tower at the Zemplínská šírava reservoir:
Photo before the ramming of German and Russian tanks in Dukla Pass:

In all places I searched and tried lots of water tanks to swim in, and then when I returned to the same place, it was a great advantage to know where to stop after a hard workout and swim in nice cool water on a hot day. Only the Otava River in Sumava was too cold.

You can find photos from the trip on my Instagram

Personal encounters

In my travels, I've visited my customers and people I've newly met through the Clubhouse app or my YouTube channel.

I have randomly selected a few YouTube videos with interviews of people I have recently met in person:

Of course, in my travels I had the opportunity to meet many new people and get to know a variety of people in the Canary Islands in the city of Las Palmas.

Work and Business

Because professional services are valued it was not a problem to get new customers. In 2021, I was able to get more/new quality customers. As my hourly rate grew with market penetration, I was able to select customers more carefully and the hourly rate from a certain amount onwards filters out even those customers who are difficult to work with. In the first instance, this eliminated all sorts of empty cajoling and haggling that consumed a lot of time without delivering value and being paid for. Overall, I have optimized the process with the initiation of collaboration and this has allowed for less time loss. The main clue for the inquirer I have A collaboration start page and how I work. Writing this page has allowed me to understand how I want and need to operate and the enquirers have all the main information in a concise manner, plus the page in question serves as a questionnaire. As a result, it saves me time.

As far as financial losses are concerned, I have not encountered any outright defaulters in 2021. And that's because of one thing, I start work for new customers by paying a deposit. Thus, by this necessary point in the process of starting a collaboration, I also filtered out various nonsensical blue sky style enquiries.
I send pro forma invoices to everyone. For new customers, this is a deposit payment. With long term cooperation and work done. I can thus sufficiently please the editing when some typo appears. (on the issued invoice should not be anymore) At the same time, I do not hang in the system unpaid invoices, which for example in the case of VAT payers are a problem, because VAT is paid on them - that is, on work that no one will pay you. At the same time, it is clear exactly what is ordered, done and is or is not paid. At the same time, I use the form of the invoice as an offer. On the invoice it says what it is and so it is clear what is paid and received. The enquirer has the payment details straight away and paying the money is a clear act of confirmation that they are seriously interested in having the work done. This saves a lot of time with arranging especially if the work is unsolicited.

Time and finances are two major points that in the end are the same problem, i.e. you work little but have no income. Unpaid work is clearly a visible problem. Then there are, however, the people who demand complex solutions, yet demand to do the analysis for free.

Another potential and typical problem in IT is pricing. This can only be solved by a paid analysis which yields a risk inventory and estimate, possibly a prototype, and subsequent work is billed by the hour A fixed price can only be given for a known, well-defined and repeatable task.

The topic of non-payers and good pricing would make for a whole article or video

. The whole thing would be an article or a video or a separate training

I've put backup into live operation, which is quick and easy to deploy, and the backed-up data is protected from ransomware or downright targeted attacks. Not counting my time, the service is definitely in the positive numbers and generates me passive income.

Conferences

Crown policy didn't really allow for in-person conferences, so all conferences were straight up being set up to be online.

I'm presenting at the 2021 OpenAlt conference:

I gave a talk at the Personality event:

A list of all the interesting events where I have given talks and a record of them can be found on my website, including slides.

Blog

I have successfully published an article on this blog of mine approximately every month - a total of 12 pieces in 2021. As I've made a rule, most of the articles are on professional topics in the information technology field. This allows me to pass on my knowledge, promote myself and it always serves as at least my own documentation. But because I am multipotential, I have added articles on other topics such as how to start traveling cheap.

Youtube

The number of subscribers on my YouTube channel has increased dramatically. Mainly thanks to my activity around Clubhouse. I was and still am occasionally active on this network and I participated in the development of an unofficial Android client called HouseClub at a time when the operator hadn't yet managed to make an official Clubhouse client for Android.
By the end of the year the number of subscribers was around 750, which is about double the number. So I expect to break the 1000 subscribers mark in 2022, which then allows me to use other YouTube features.

As for topics, I have many in store, just not enough time to elaborate and write or film them in detail.

Summary

The year 2021 was again challenging, but those who did not stand still but worked on themselves moved on. And despite all the obstacles so far, there was still an opportunity to enjoy life.