December 2023: Year in Review
This year I've talked to a lot of influential developers, built my first OSS library, and learned a good bit more about Python web scrapers and GitHub Actions workflows. There's never a dull moment.
Hello all,
A very happy holidays and end of the year to you!
Leading up to the end of this year, the month of December’s been a bit of a rough one for me: even though I’ve been healthy most of 2023, I managed to catch not one but two bugs leading up to the holidays which really made me feel behind schedule in regards to being ready for Christmas. It seems I wasn’t alone when I compared notes with friends and family, though, which has made me feel a little better.
Despite the unplanned illnesses, I’m very glad to be recapping all the positive goings on for the past year with you, so let’s see what happened in 2023.
This year I talked about web development. A lot.
Not only did I join the LogRocket podcast as a host in the spring, but I also started a new front-end-focused podcast with two of my friends, and participated in a handful of conferences and webinars talking about IoT and web development.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to realize how silly it is to try and predict what the future will bring - because it’s never, ever what actually ends up happening! 😝 And this year was no exception.
After being a guest on a handful of PodRocket podcasts sharing my knowledge and opinions, the LogRocket team invited me to join their rotation of co-hosts, which I gladly accepted.
Over the course of this year, I’ve had the good fortune to talk to some of the influential folks helping shape our web development community today. People like Adam Argyle and Una Kravets, Rachel Nabors and Rachel Andrew, Dominik Dorfmeister, and even two of the React Core team members, among others. It’s been such a great experience to interview these fascinating people and hear about the cool things they’re doing to improve our dev experiences first hand!
Around the same time, my two friends (and former co-hosts of the React Roundup podcast), Jack Herrington and TJ VanToll and I, started our own podcast: Front-end Fire. Each week we publish a new episode where we cover the latest and greatest news happening now in the web dev world, and from time to time, we have special guests join us to talk about new releases and cool stuff they’re working on.
We try to keep the episodes short, fun, and relevant, and I hope you might give it a listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
I built my first open source software (OSS) library and published it to npm: Notehub JS.
Earlier this year at work, I had to keep rewriting the same HTTP requests across multiple web apps to fetch data from Notehub, a critical part of the IoT startup Blues, that I work for. It was a less than ideal solution, so I built a JavaScript-based library for the Notehub API and published it on npm for anyone to use in their own web apps.
Building (and largely automating) the publishing and maintenance of the Notehub JS library was an excellent learning opportunity for me, and it served as great fodder for some new blog posts around GitHub Actions workflows as well.
Which leads me to my final update for the year: blog posts and articles.
Although I primarily develop in JavaScript and TypeScript for my job, this year I ended up getting quite a bit of experience in Python, SQL ORMs, and automating devops-related GitHub Action workflows.
As I mentioned above, I automated a whole host of things to make updating and deploying the Notehub JS library quicker and easier: publishing a new version of the GitHub library automatically to npm, creating a new pull request automatically in a repo, and copying an updated file from one repo to another automatically.
Additionally, a friend asked me to build a CSV spreadsheet of NFT data that he could sort and manipulate, and I ended up having to build a Selenium WebDriver Python-based web scraper to scrape the data from the site, and then include all the extra info he wanted.
That series of blog posts is still in progress (I’ve only written a couple of the articles I intend to so far). Stay tuned for more next year.
Suffice it to say, I’ve stretched my programming skills in new directions this past year (and learned a bunch of useful things along the way that I can now share with you!), and it’s been fun and challenging just the way I like it.
Time has flown by this year, but looking back, I’ve accomplished quite a bit (almost none of which I could have predicted when 2023 started!). Overall it’s been a good year of growing, struggling and stretching, and learning new things.
I hope you can take a moment to reflect back as well, and realize just how much you’ve done as well. You may be presently surprised.
Wishing you a great start to 2024,
- Paige
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