All about 2020: Side Projects, Date, & A lot of weight gain

Shubham Bhatt
5 min readDec 31, 2020

So, this is my third consecutive year writing the year end review and here I mostly document my materialistic achievements, numbers and what all happened during the year.

🔗 Last year review, in case if you are curious 😂

Largely because it gives me a sense of how my year went by, gives me something to look back upon and also, helps me document my journey year by year.

Now, talking about the year in a nutshell, here is my activity summarised.

I think enough is already said about how Unprecedented (probably the most used word after Pandemic) the year was, so, I’ll not talk about it. It was the same for me as well.

Since, most of the year went into my day job and couple of side projects, so, let’s talk about it:

The hustle on the side

Covid Tracker App: You might remember that when the lockdown happened, there was a lot of anxiety around COVID, right.

And most designers were on a quest of designing a covid tracker app. Well yes, I was also the part of the bandwagon.

But, my app also got developed as a PWA. Here is the 🔗 link and the blog about it.

All Design Events: This one is very close to me. I owe a lot to the design events that used to happen in Bangalore and always used to keep a close eye on all the design events happening around me.

So, I had this idea of making a repository of curated design events but it was parked for some time but then in Feb/Jan this year, Pablo Stanley posted about all design conferences and I was like, shit, it was my idea and that put fire in my ass.

And I also got to know about webflow then, And that’s when I thought, I’ll have to start and long story short, 1st of March, is when I launched it and so far it has been a wonderful ride. Here are the stats.

🔗 Link to the website

Imagif Figma Plugin: In the lockdown itself, we also managed to launch a Figma plugin for stock photos and GIFs and so far, it has amassed over 1.5K installs and yes, it was a fun ride doing it with a developer friend of mine.

We also happened to be #4 product of the day on product hunt for a short period of time.

🔗 Link to the plugin

Some other stuff

The Date ❣️

Talking about my personal life, I dated a girl and I kinda liked her but sadly we could not take it so far.

I won’t go into the specifics but few things that did not worked out:

  • Right after we met, I moved back to my hometown and sadly, it somehow became a long distance dating.
  • The temperament also did not matched and hence, we were out of sync.

So, it ended in 2 months. Hey girl, in case if you are reading this, I wish you all the best for you future endeavours and it was nice sweet time.

Mighty fear of road 🏍

Oh boy, I was procrastinating on this one for very long. I wanted to be comfortable riding a two wheeler but never got time to do that.

And when I moved back to my home town, I finally managed to practice daily and boys and girls, now I am comfortable riding one.

I had a fear of roads and conquering that was one of the things I wanted to do very badly. All my life so far, I have been a pillion rider but boys and girls, not anymore.

Cheers to some road trips now.

Completing 1 year in design 👨‍💻

This July, I completed one year in design and I have talked enough about it so, Here is the blog link for details.

Live sessions 🎤

Hosted one and was a part of couple of sessions related to side projects, webflow and remote working:

Now, talking about the things where I lagged.

The not so good part

  • Scaling All Design Events to a full fledged product: I started great but as usual the problem lies when I try to scale things up.
  • Inconsistent with UXSprout: I wanted to be consistent with my writing but failed to do so.
  • Not focusing on my health: Gained 10+ KGs during lockdown and I can feel the weight of it now.
  • Failed at getting rid of something I want to get rid of sometime now. A bad habit.

What’s in for next year?

Not a big fan of making resolutions, but here are few tracks where I would want to excel.

  • Focus on health.
  • Having products which has the potential to scale.
  • More of Reading and writing.
  • Up skilling.

For documentation sake, here are my social media stats:

That’s all folks.

If you have made it this far, thanks. Means a lot.

Just in case, if you want to talk about design, philosophy, blogging or startups , do let me know. Coffee on me.

Here are my social media handles, just in case if you want to slide into my dm.

Thank you. Have a good year ahead.

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