2018 Reflections…

Well 2018 is over now and what a year its been!

I started officially coding in the beginning of 2017 so I see that year as being my year of learning, and 2018 was the year of continuing learning but this time whilst in a professional job.

The learning never ends… and that’s great!

When I first started self studying I watched a lot of Coding Train, which used Javascript. After doing the boot camp it came full circle and I decided that I really did love Javascript, the web, and therefore Front End.

The Break

As you may or may not have known, I had taken a break from blogging since September. I mainly concentrated on my new job and wanted to settle myself down in London.

Initially you write blogs for yourself… or at least thats what they say. But soon a blogpost can blow up and you can get some momentum. Then that could influence what you write, and what your purpose is.

My most popular post yet!

That has been a hard thing to balance. I wanted to write stuff about things I had discovered or learned, but they would be ‘incomplete’ and possibly wrong at times. I do like to try stuff out, but then I worried about the post not being worthy to teach readers about it, since I’m not an ‘expert’ in that field.

I started to care too much about living up to that standard of that react post. Really it should always be about what I wanna write about and that should be that. So I’m back for 2019, but not quite sure how regularly I’ll post and it’ll be a mixture of stuff I’ve learned and or tidbits of random stuff. Gonna try to keep them short and sweet.

I also feel that Medium has turned into a text form of the clickbait YouTube. I’ve lost interest in a lot of the writers out there because my feed is literally shouting at me with articles annoying overhyped titles and x number of ways that this and that will improve your life. Its a guru’s dream for inspiring and getting followers, but in my opinion there’s a lot of bullshit writers out there trying to claps. Makes for boring repetitive content… its been quite off putting.

My 2018 Wins

Its super unBritish but its really important to reflect on the achievements.

Us Brits love to play things down, and my theory is that its because we’re so freaking awkward we don’t know how to handle receiving compliments!

• Got my first job!
• Learning about CSS, and SASS and responsive layout
• Learning (and loving Vue)
• Getting my second job!
• Learning React, improving my ES6 Javascript, and I’m very proud of the tech tests that I completed during my job hunt which are still helpful today.
• Learning about MJML, responsive email layout
• Working with Google Maps API to build Store Locator pages
• Built an advent calendar promotion, which involved creating multiple modals and react components
• Learning about A/B testing
• Checking out web desktop notifications
• Learning about animated Sprites, and creating some games
• Pretty proud of my side projects - checking out GraphQL, created a chat app using websockets, using external API’s and exploring the alternative integration tester cypress.

Wow, making this list myself it actually reminds me of stuff that I forgot about! 2018 certainly had its ups and downs but its definitely been a great year for me, and I look forward to 2019.

You guys manage to get any cool wins? Maybe it could be good to list em out! Sometimes we’re just to hard on ourselves…

Resolutions might come later, need to have a think about those. Til next time!