With 2018 drawing to a close, I’d like to take a moment to review some of my personal highlights from the past year.
Attended Recurse Center
2018 was by far the first time that I hit the ground running at the start of the year. I successfully matriculated(?) at the Recurse Center in their first ever mini retreat and spent a full week in January learning and building alongside a bunch of incredibly smart, talented recursers. My project for the week was to ramp up on WebGL and gain (pseudo) proficiency in working with shaders. While I managed to somewhat accomplish this, I also spent a good chunk of time pairing on other recurser projects that ranged from building compilers to writing functional code in haskell. The week was wonderful, albeit a tad exhausting and I hope to return again sometime soon.
Got burnt at my first startup
2018 was also the year that I got to see the real ugly side of working at a startup. In the early part of the year, I was a couple of months into my first startup (and fulltime VueJS) gig when shit really hit the fan. Long story short, we ran out of money, the founder lied about how much money we had (spoiler alert: we had none), and my entire team went without pay for 2 months. It sucked. But after months of hesitation, I finally walked and left a situation that caused me immense anxiety and stress.
Joined Netlify!
My departure from my first startup, also coincided (not a coincidence!) with my entry into another startup, Netlify. I was nervous, but excited. Unlike the first startup, Netlify was far more established and I truly believed in (and cared about) the mission of the JAMstack. While there is no way to predict a startup’s success with certainty, I couldn’t turn away the opportunity to champion a product I love and work alongside such an incredibly intelligent and talented team. I’ve been 6 months in and all I can say is, I’ve never been happier.
Went on Yet Another Visa Run
At this point in my life, visa runs are pretty standard. So far, I’ve kept a record of at least 1 visa run per year for the last 3-4 years. If you know me well, I often complain about this but I’m rarely bitter about it. My visa situation is a lot better than many—thanks to the pure chance of being born from a country that #45 doesn’t hate (yet). And for that I’m grateful.
Travelled and Spoke a lot
2018 was also the year where I ramped up on conference speaking and work-related travel. I spoke at 7 conferences over the course of the year, many of which were clustered toward the end of the year. Travel took me to many wonderful places, both far flung and close to home. And I even managed to sneak in visits to many friends I hadn’t seen in years. I have so many people to thank for opportunities such as this namely Netlify (obvs), Sarah Drasner, Tracy Lee, Chris Fritz, Pratik Patel, Joe Eames and Jilson Thomas.
Joined a panel for a podcast
I’m an avid podcast listener and so joining a podcast as a regular panelist felt like a natural transition for me. I was lucky enough to have been connected up with Chuck of DevChat.TV via Chris Fritz and from then on became a regular part of the Views on Vue podcast. The podast is wonderful and it’s a great chance for me to catch up with all things Vue while hanging out with some really cool people.
Wrote many blogposts
I started out the year intending to write more consistently. Though I didn’t necessarily accomplish this goal, I caught up later in the year by publishing 9 posts on the Netlify blog and 28 on my personal blog, most of which were results of my #devAdvent project. In spite of my love for writing, I often find writing tedious. Even so, this year taught me that writing isn’t always as hard as I make it out to be. The key to writing better is consistency. In 2019, I hope to do more of this.
Takeaways
2018 proved to be a wonderful year for me and I finally feel like I’ve finally “come into my own” as a developer. I did all most of the things I set myself out to do and I look forward to doing more next year!