In 2016, I started my own web comic revolving around a girl named Clara and her best friend Pong, a red panda. These were just short weekly strips, which I initially inked by hand, scanned in, and colored digitally. Here’s one of the first episodes, where Pong receives his name:

After about a year, it was time to start a bigger story about my two heroes! I didn’t realize how big it would become, though: The story has now reached 70 pages, with one published page per week. The final book will be around 100 pages, hopefully finished by the end of 2018. It’s only German so far, but I hope to do a translation once I’m done with the first pass. Here are a few sample pages:

This continues to be a huge and rewarding personal adventure. Just as in software development: When you don’t even know what you don’t know about what it takes to finish a project, that’s where the fun is and where the best learning happens.