December 2021: Year in Review
We didn't return to "normal" this year, but there's still good things to look back on and be proud of.
Hi friends,
I’m taking this edition of my newsletter to reflect on the past year.
I know for many folks it’s been as challenging as 2020, but personally, I have a lot to be thankful for. As you’ll see from this list, I said “yes” to a lot of opportunities that came my way, many of which weren’t even on my radar when 2021 began. And I am proud I kept doing the things that scared me - things I wasn’t sure I would succeed at. Because now I know I can.
Let’s get started recapping.
In March I launched my new personal website (and this corresponding newsletter to go along with it).
From the time I decided to create a new personal site to showcase my writing, my videos and talks, and a little more about me personally, it took me just under a year to get it to where I was ready to show it off to the world. Along the way I learned a lot about working with Gatsby, combining data from many sources, and responsive design, and I got to do some really fun things like build a subscription button with a shifting gradient and animate a mobile hamburger menu.
I joined the React Wednesdays live stream show, not once, not twice, but three times this year.
Yes, no joke. My first appearance was in February when I discussed working with large React applications for my job at The Home Depot. My second time on was during the React Wednesdays React All-Day show in June where I talked about things to keep in mind when modernizing enterprise React applications. And for my third show in July, I tried out GitHub Copilot with the show’s hosts - that was an especially fun episode.
July was the start of a new chapter in my tech career: I joined the IoT startup Blues Wireless.
My appearances on React Wednesdays actually contributed to my learning about the opening Blues had for a staff-level frontend software engineer, and in July, it became official.
Since then, I’ve been immersed in the Internet of Things world, and the opportunities Blues makes possible are immense. Not only do I help build the sites to teach developers how to use our products and services, but I’ve also built my own IoT projects, written about the similarities between Blues Wireless and frontend frameworks like React, and even started a new Blues TV series: The Niedringhaus Effect, where I compare the unfamiliar (IoT and hardware) to concepts web developers are familiar with (JavaScript and the web).
I’m excited about what we’ve got coming for customers in 2022 both on the hardware and software side, so keep an eye out for updates.
In October, my course “The newline Guide to Modernizing an Enterprise React App” debuted.
Authoring a course about web development is not something I ever saw myself doing, but when newline.co approached me about it, I said “Yes.”
Over the course of 8 months, I wrote 54 lessons and recorded 10.5 hours of videos sharing all that I've learned about building & maintaining enterprise-sized React apps, with lots of hands on coding examples as we upgrade a real world React application to follow today's software engineering best practices.
There's so much to know when it comes to long-lived, business critical applications in large organizations, so I wrote the React course I wish I could have learned from early on.
From upgrading and refactoring an existing application, to tooling and linting, to design systems and testing - the list is long, and this course is thorough.
If you'd like a taste of what the full course includes, there's a free video on YouTube to whet your appetite.
And throughout all of this, I kept writing about tech. In fact, this month I wrote a new article about building a blog post filter in Gatsby.
I've been writing regularly for almost 4 years now, there's a lot of blog articles to sort through on the site, so I wanted to make a filter on the blog page to let readers narrow down what they were interested in. There's a catch to this filter though, and it's twofold:
I wanted to give readers multiple parts of a blog they could search by: titles, subtitles, and tags.
Not all of my posts live on my site: many are hosted on other platforms like Medium, Hackster.io, etc. so I couldn't rely solely on Gatsby's GraphQL queries during page generation to grab all the post data needed.
It made for a tricky situation, and in this post, I show how to build a blog filter that accesses data from multiple sources and filters them by multiple parameters.
Looking back, there were a lot of highlights to cover, and I’m sure there’s plenty in store for 2022 we can’t even begin to imagine now. I hope you’ll challenge yourself next year to do new things that make you uncomfortable too - you might surprise yourself just how far you’ve come by the end.
Wishing you a great start to 2022,
- Paige