March Retrospective - COVID-19 Edition

Well this month has been… interesting.

Like many IHers out there, I’ve been at home and avoiding the invisible enemy that has waged war against humanity.

While not the type to get too stir crazy, not this early on, the month has actually been quite good. A lot of focus has been on our internals, data detection and integrity checks as well as starting to put together some better documentation, as we’ve finally outgrown the documentation style/layout that we’ve been using since damn near day 1.

With all of the crazy going on, Holiday API appears to have been inoculated against COVID-19. Even though we do service quite a few companies in the travel and hospitality space, we’ve ended up having one of our best months ever in both terms of month over month growth from last month as well as year over year growth against March 2019.

My theory there is that developers are one of the fortunate career paths that aren’t directly affected by these sorts of things, especially in terms of being forced into remote work. Developers are happiest when they are shipping, and being able to wake up and roll out of bed and start hacking is a good thing.

As I’ve mentioned a few times this year, we’re in that polish phase where everything we’re doing now is a ton more nuanced in terms of iterations than it was when we were building out the bulk of the system in the early days.

I’ve had folks reach out because I’ve evidently given off this vibe that I’m either burned out or overwhelmed with the project at this point. A lot can get lost over text on a screen I guess, because that’s far from the case.

So much so that while working primarily on Holiday API (outside of my full-time job, because I’m still living that dream ;) I’m venturing more and more into new projects not because I’m bored with what I’m doing, but because I’m extremely inspired.

As a whole, the more full my plate is, the more fired up I am to do more. Being fired up about something just gets me fired up about other things. Excitement breeds more excitement, and I’m still an optimistic dreamer when it comes to the potential of things to come.

With that, be safe out there (in there?) and keep on hacking y’all.