Year 2012 in Review

Jesse Chen • January 29, 2013 4 min read

Most awesome year ever#

Would be the shortest way to describe 2012.  It has been a while since the last post, which was an analysis of how the launch of my first Android app InstaWifi went.  For 2013, my resolution is to post more content than in 2012, and to continue to write meaningful and helpful content for android developers as well as some other various random thoughts I may have specifically on tech, entrepreneurship, or on life after college.

In the year 2012, I wrote six posts:

  1. Getting out of the Consumer Mindset - I thought about how much information I consume on a daily basis and it made me aware that I no longer want to solely be a consumer of information but to also be a producer of information.  Since then, I have stopped my addiction with Google Reader, and over the course of the year have become more productive by attending a lot of competitions/hackathons, building cool stuff, and in general, doing a lot more write actions instead of reads.
  2. Protip: Bash Autocomplete for Android ADB - Android development can be a little frustrating at times, but finding little gems such as autocompletion of adb commands, or debugging your app without a cable makes it much better.
  3. Playing the Student Card - I got so much free crap because I was a student that it would be wrong not to share.  Getting a free github micro plan, amazon prime, and discounted Google I/O tickets are some of the most notable ones.
  4. Protip: How to be a Good Boss - This was a more personal post of mine that I wrote to reflect on my experiences being a lead for 3 years for a small technical team.  It's possible that I don't actually really know what it's like to be a good boss, but it's out there for people to digest.
  5. Freeing Your Online Graduation Pictures - This was a fun tutorial that I co-wrote with Jonathan Tien.  The both of us being CS nerds having just graduated, we wanted to save our grad pictures only to find out they disabled right-click > save as, and put an ugly watermark all over our beautiful bodies.  We weren't going to have any of that, so we wrote this lengthy, but ultimately useful, tutorial on how to nab those pictures, and to use photoshop to remove the watermark.  It went viral on Facebook and was a huge hit among our class.
  6. Post-hoc Analysis of InstaWifi’s Launch - InstaWifi was my first Android app ever released to the market, and I remember being blown away by the positive reception that I received from the online community. I decided to share with other developers the hard numbers of my launch and some of the reasoning that I put into the app and what worked and what didn't.

Looking back, I'm happy with the blog posts I've written.  My goal for 2013 is to force myself to write more and be more comfortable in my voice in writing.  Also, possibly time to do an entire redesign of this website.

Damn.#

2012.  Easily the most action-packed year in my life so far.  Key highlights include: interviews everywhere, 626, lake tahoe, linsanity, winning hackathons, calchat, graduating, moving out for the first time, buying my first car, first day of work, and launching my first app into the app store.  It's hard to imagine that just about half a year ago, we were still students going to class everyday and not having to worry about bills, or commutes, or taking a larger-amount-than-normal effort to hang out with friends on the weekends.  Now as a working young adult, we have these things called responsibilities.  What's that?  It is like we have all aged and matured so quickly in the past half year, and that makes me excited for what the future brings but at the same time miss the care-free days of being a student.

One good thing about not being a student anymore though, is that we now have money, which (!), if you're smart, should save wisely now while you're young (but that is a post for later).  Stay tuned.

© 2021, Jesse Chen • 129489e