State of KaKaRoTo 2021

Hello everyone!

I am quite a bit late in posting this "state of KaKaRoTo", as I had planned to post it in January like I did last year, but I guess better late than never!

I want this post to be shorter than the last so people can actually read it (without first putting that on their calendar or trying to find the courage to open it), so I'll do my best to be short :)

Last year, I had a few resolutions for 2021, let's look back and see how I did on each : 

• My health: I said I'd work less and take better care of my mental and physical health. I have to say I'm proud of the progress I've made, though I admit it's not enough. I did go from working 80 to 100 hours per week in 2020, to an average of 60 to 70 hours a week in 2021, which is great. I also manage to take most of my weekends off and enjoy some free time, but it's not enough, as I need to drop my hours to about 40 per week and also start exercising! 
• The Forge: Yes, of course, I worked a lot on the Forge, taking up most of my time. It wasn't quite what I hoped to do on the Forge (more on that later), but over all, it was a good year and I think we made some amazing progress and I'm much less stressed in my everyday life.
• D&D Beyond Converter: This is one of my greatest failings of 2021 🙁While I did release the beta of the converter in April (and it works great! With only a few shortcomings/caveats), I haven't been able to dedicate to it as much time as I had hoped or promised and there are so many features I want to add to it (+ fixing the existing limitations). Things are changing in 2022, as we already started working on that again, but I wish I had made faster progress on that.
• Beyond20: I love Beyond20 and the project is still going strong. I made a few releases last year and we added some pretty cool features. Overall it's a stable and mature project that keeps being improved.

I'm not going to do a 'year in review' where I go through each month like last time, but I'll just give a big summary : 

Lat year, I started off by seeking help, which was in the form of a hiring phase where I got a few people to join The Forge to help alleviate some of the tasks. That didn't go quite as planned because instead of taking on some of my work and me finding more free time, I actually added "manage a team" and "project manager" to my list of already existing long list of tasks. Thankfully, I learned from that experience and the team learned to be more independent and eventually things were going well. I later did a call for developers to hire and help out with the Forge, and eventually, I got 3 great talents to help out, and we're now becoming an efficient machine.

The Forge website got a big overhaul and update, making it cleaner and we've spent a lot of time improving the performance and designing and setting up new servers (our new European servers were just released yesterday!). Unfortunately, I feel like about half of the year was spent on untangling the absolute nightmarish mess of international sales tax laws and obligations. I won't bore you with the details, but... it's a mess! But we figured it out! We've released our D&D Beyond integration, and made good progress on the Time Machine feature (not yet released) and we recently release our Forge dice set for Dice So Nice, on our Bazaar!

On the Beyond20 front, we've had 3 major releases, and 2 minor ones and I have some plans for the next 2.7.0 release which I think will be pretty awesome. One of the biggest/long-awaited feature was the native rolls support for Foundry, which has been added. It still needs some tweaking but it appears to be doing its job for most users!

R20Converter saw a major release in January and a few smaller releases throughout the year. There hasn't been a lot of work done on that front, but I started working recently on adding support for the new lighting system in Roll20. I've also upgraded it to support v9, though I'm still working on the cards/decks support. I will be releasing a new version of the converter later today actually though it's not the full major update I wanted to release, but that will be a good version to fix some of the current issues and add v9 support.

Conclusion

This year will hopefully continue to show my improvements on taking better care of myself and being less stressed over juggling 1000 things at a time. I can't wait to show you what I have in store for Beyond20 and push some of the long awaited features for the Forge and the update to R20Converter. If I'm able to get a really good work/life balance, I might be able to pick up writing again, since I really liked doing that, but it's just impossible to do when you're exhausted from coding all day. 

And on the subject of taking better care of myself, I'm going on vacation tomorrow! 🥳My first real vacation in the last 3 years (I did take "time off" during December, but I still worked about 35 to 40 hours every week during that fake vacation).

Thanks again everybody for your continued support and thanks for reading!

KaKaRoTo