December 2024: Year in Review
53 new podcast episodes, OSS projects, and learning, building, and sharing web dev.
Hi friends,
I blinked and it’s already the end of 2024. Truly, where has this past year gone?
Let’s do a quick recap of the web dev and tech-related things I’ve done this year, in case you’re in need of a bit of reading or listening material at this time between holidays when we’re all in limbo.
Also, whatever holidays you celebrate (or don’t), I wish you all the best as we begin 2025.
I continued podcasting about web development on both Front-end Fire and LogRocket.
Mid-2023, my friends TJ, Jack and myself, started a weekly web dev news podcast called Front-End Fire, and this year we published 53 new episodes(!).
We’ve had a number of notable guests on during the year, including: Rachel Nabors, Evan Bacon, and Matt Carroll to talk about the “two Reacts”, and Rob Eisenberg to discuss how to build web components at scale, and lots and lots of interesting news (and tech drama) in between.
And also in 2023, I joined the LogRocket podcast PodRocket, as a recurring co-host.
This year I’ve had the privilege of interviewing (or re-interviewing) some lovely, and very influential folks in the web development community. In 2024, I talked with the Next.js team about partial pre-rendering, learned strategies for handling CSS in React Server Components with Josh Comeau, got updates on React Compiler with the core React Core team, and even learned more about BlueSky and “the web without walls” with former React Core team member Dan Abramov.
Both podcasts have been such a joy to be a part of, and I look forward to continuing them in 2025.
The JavaScript OSS library published in 2023 (Notehub JS), was extended to have a Python equivalent, Notehub Py, in 2024.
As the IoT startup I work for (Blues) continues to expand its offerings to support more IoT devices in more corners of the world, we wanted to make it as easy as possible for developers to interact with their data once it's reached our cloud (Notehub), and we realized many of our developers wanted to do so in the Python programming language.
Just as I did with Notehub JS, Notehub Py is an open source, Python-based SDK on GitHub, and published on PyPI for anyone to download and use for free.
Once again, automating most of the publishing and maintenance of the Notehub Py library provided a good learning opportunity for me, and more content for blog posts about GitHub Actions workflows.
And (as I have done since 2018), I published some more web development blog posts and articles!
I didn’t publish as many blogs as last year (I was aiming for one every other month), but I still got a handful out: many related to Python, devops, and some fun new CSS tricks I picked up along the way.
A web scraper program I built in Python last year started off my blog posts in 2024, as I manipulated the scraped data to include extra info and then download to a nicely formatted CSV, I sharpened my GitHub Actions skills with the Notehub Py library, and I got to play with some cool new(er) CSS features like scroll snap and CSS clip paths.
CSS has had a couple of banner years now, and I love learning its new capabilities as challenging designs come across my plate.
I have a running list of other JavaScript, React, and CSS-related topics to write about in 2025, so stay tuned for more posts along these lines next year.
2024 went by pretty quickly, but reflecting on what happened, I’d say it’s a pretty good list of stuff, actually. Here’s to another year of learning new things and pushing beyond where we are today.
I hope you can take a moment to look back as well, and remember just how much you’ve accomplished. You may be presently surprised.
Wishing you a great start to 2025,
- Paige
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