2017 passed by in a blink! The most amazing that happened this year was that we travelled 4 times! To Israel, which is life-changing, to Cebu, during Liz’s birthday, to Korea, which was unplanned, and finally to Hokkaido with Lizzy’s Mom. Israel is where we experienced where Jesus walked in real life, especially on the Sea of Galilee. Cebu is where I realised I don’t like holidays that do nothing but I sacrifice for Liz. Haha. Korea is when I realised I missed Liz after she went USA for two weeks. And Hokkaido was like our dream road trip.
And of course, this year marks one full year working in a new place. Working here is like family, where there’s no politics, no gossip and not much red tape. Although there’s some ups and downs when I feel bored, it’s also a year with alot less meetings compared to my previous work place, and where I learnt a lot more programming stuff than ever, getting to play with PHP and Laravel. Some of the things I learnt this year include:
- Playing with different HTML5 video players (Azure, Haivision, VideoJS)
- Interaction between React, AJAX and Backend Laravel
- A bit of DraftJS
- Basic Laravel collections and routes and views
- Building Single Page Apps with React and Material UI and Firebase
- Best practices for webpack/mix/scss/BEM/CSS compilation and JS frontend loading order
- Best practices for Google Analytics and Enhanced eCommerce + advanced event logging + Data Studio
- Best practices for responsive image loading with Imgix
- Testing of meta tags / schema.org
- Design Thinking process and research
- Sketch App
Ministry-wise, one of my wishes was greater ownership from the youths that they can run the service themselves. This was certainly fulfilled as the graduating bunch of Sec 4 is the best batch so far, with many great leaders like Daniel and Dominic who can run the lights board themselves, design and programme their own songs without much guidance. The best thing that happened was I managed to pair up Dominic and Ivan from Arrow together for the Christmas service, and they managed to learn and sharpen each other. It’s always the teacher’s honour to be able to train someone who becomes better than me! A very proud moment indeed.
The last two days of 2017, we had the privilege to spend time with two unofficial caregroups – one is a “dream” cg with a bunch of awesome people from work. All married couples, but our lives intertwined together by a common calling, not by coincidence, not by chance, but by divine appointment. It was a great moment just to share openly without our titles or responsibilities. During the interaction, we also realised that as a couple, Liz and I achieved a pretty healthy rhythm in the 2nd year of our marriage – having home-cooked breakfasts almost every morning, and going to work peacefully everyday. I’m glad our marriage dynamics are not very complicated, although Liz is a complicated person 😉
The other fun thing that happened at the end of 2017 was we hosted a random bunch of “lonely cg-less” people for watchnight at our place. We had fun watching a documentary “Christ In Me”, spending time in worship, eating ice cream, and playing Secret Hitler. Jesus visited our humble living room during the worship and declared that 2018 shall be a year of His-Presence-With-Us. It has been raining the past 24 hours and we wanted to go cycling initially, but this was so much better. I think Liz and I have kinda settled that our CG is not really an official CG per-se, but random bunch of people whom we hang out with in and out of office. Along the way, we also have couple friends whom we can walk this journey with. Praying for more to come!
Praying that in 2018, I will have no more strain in my wrists as I continue to use the mouse and computer!