This video feels weird for me to make, because you usually see me as the bubbly, playful guy teaching creative web dev and cool code. But I’ve been extremely inactive on YouTube, and I owed you an honest overview of what my last year actually looked like. At the beginning of last year my dad became ill, and not long after I ended up in hospital with an infection of the heart muscle. With my history of open-heart surgery and an artificial valve, things escalated fast. I got out of hospital, and a few days later my dad passed away—he was diagnosed with terminal cancer and he was gone within two months. After that, my health deteriorated even further. My valve started functioning poorly, it turned into severe heart failure, and I hit a point where I didn’t even have the energy to get up and go to the toilet. I was admitted again, assessed as critical, and taken to London by ambulance for almost immediate heart surgery. The surgery went well, I’ve pretty much fully recovered, and I’m feeling great now—but that’s why YouTube wasn’t even on the priority list. Now I’m back, and I’m rebranding the channel around something real: I’ve bootstrapped a startup in creative marketing for tech companies. I’m launching soon and I’ll be posting weekly behind-the-scenes videos—what I’m building, what I’m learning, the risks, the clients, the wins, and the struggles—so we can turn this into a proper community again.