Another year has come and gone and with that it’s time for everyone to write there ‘The year that was’ posts. I missed doing it in 2016 but though that for 2017 I’d do one as it was an interesting year for me.
A quick look at my blog history shows that I did a total of 21 posts in 2017, which is not bad given that I didn’t start blogging again until I rebuilt my site in July!
This does mean that I didn’t really talk about the first half of the year much, and who knows what happened then! Well one thing that happened was my first trip to NDC London to present my Redux, beyond React and The Beauty of Stupid Ideas talks. The other was working on a very large program of work for a multinational organisation that saw me spending a lot of time in meetings at all hours of the day.
2017 also saw me get deeper into the PC role I was promoted to in 2016 at Readify but then during the later half of the year I shifted across to the sales team to broaden my skills across the business.
I spent more time in React, partially because we were using it on this large project and partially because I enjoyed it. One question I was pondering was how to best use SVG’s with React which led to these two posts that show how easy animating SVG’s with React can be.
I continued my involvement with DDD Sydney, joined the agenda committee for NDC Sydney (and spoke there too) and of course headed down for DDD Melbourne.
The other bit of tech that I plated around with, and used to indulge my stupid ideas, was Docker. I gave a talk called Docker, FROM scratch at DDD Melbourne and NDC Sydney that I’m quite proud of (and have received very positive feedback on), and I then looked at really crazy uses of Docker like running VS Code on Linux from WSL from Windows 10 which may not be useful to anyone unless you have to debug PowerShell on Linux.
Open Source was a big part of the latter half of the year, with a major update to my PowerShell node version manager and Chauffeur getting more love. Expect to see more on Chauffeur this year, I’ve been working on some nifty stuff with it for the upcoming Umbraco Down Under Festival.
And that’s pretty much a wrap for another 12 months!