2016 Year in Review

2016 Year in Review

I can’t believe it is March already. It seems like we just started 2017…well, I Fguess we kinda did. Anyways, I finally got around to publishing my year in review for 2016 and I am pretty happy with how far I have come in a year. Enjoy!

Good bye 2016, hello 2017!

When I look back at non-personal things that happened in 2016, it wasn’t the greatest. We lost A LOT of people. People who influenced culture like art and music. The country also started to fold in front of our eyes with the election, which will go down in history as the biggest dumpster fire that has ever happened in the U.S.A.

Travel

Personally though, the year was great. I traveled to Denver three different times in 5 months. My best friend Nicole accepted a job in Denver at a hair salon and we drove from Detroit to Denver. Talk about an epic road trip. While I was there I met up with my buddy Scott Tolinski, who runs LevelUp Tuts on YouTube. Him and I did a video to add to his Q&A playlist. That was super fun. I also met up Miriam Suzanne and talked Sass and shop as well as met a new friend, Megan who is also a developer in the Denver tech scene.

Nicole and I went through the Rockies and got to experience the beauty that is Colorado. We hung out on Broadway and I went and hung out at the science museum.

The last trip I made to Denver, we went to Estes Park and saw the Stanley Hotel. That was one thing I wanted to cross off my bucket list and I did just that. If you are not familiar with the Stanley Hotel, it is the hotel that was the setting for The Shining.

Community

My community involvement really amped up in 2016. I gave talks, helped assist workshops, volunteered and co-organized events. I designed and developed the logo for DetroitJS as well as gave a talk for the first ever Meetup. I had help from my buddy TJ to build the tool I was working on and gave a talk about that, needless to say, my 5 minute lightning talk turned in to 3 minutes because I had some technical difficulties with my speaker notes. No big deal, I still got my speaker coin.

I co-organized Global Accessibility Awareness Day at Grand Circus in Detroit. That was a blast. I recruited developers from Deque in Ann Arbor to help out with screen reader usage and answer questions during the workshop. The turn out was great. I also made stickers for that event as well.

I give a lot of talks for Refresh Detroit which is a local user group here in the city. One of the talks I gave for them was a lightning talk on my 3 favorite chrome dev tools.

In May, Self.Conference came along and I volunteered to help with that alongside my friend Amber Conville, the organizer and founder of Self.Conf. Self.Conf brought a lot of people from all over the country in to keynote and give talks on Web, software, and life. It was great being a part of that effort and with it being in my backyard it made it that much better.

Life

Such is life right? I went through a bad non-breakup. By that I mean there was no title but there was an underlying relationship between me and the other person. I got 6 new tattoos; my arms are almost finished. My friend Marcy came to visit from Washington. She is a senior front-end engineer that works at Deque remotely. She was in town for a week thing and we hung out a couple times. I showed her around downtown Ann Arbor along with her co-worker Wilco from the Netherlands.

I left DTE to start a new job at United Shore in Troy, Michigan as a Senior UI Developer. This was a great step in the right direction for my career and it is all UI all the time. No pressure in having to learn anything dealing with Java or MySql, Web services, etc. I also have full support from my leadership to speak at conferences which is a plus. I work with a stellar team too so that is awesome.

The summer beer fest happened in downtown Ypsilanti and I was there. My first beer fest and I had a blast with great friends. I hope to do it again next year.

In September I moved from Wyandotte to Detroit. Making a move like that to a huge city with real estate prices soaring was a huge deal for me. Detroit gets a bad rap but come to the city and hang out for a weekend. You will see that Detroit is not a bad place.

I added to my ink collection and got 6 new tattoos and met one of my favorite tattoo artists in the game, Bob Tyrrell.

Code and Blog Things

Last year was a good time for me to get some projects off the back burner and out to the community. The things I released are listed below.

ng-WTF: ngWhatTheF*ck was inspired by my friend Heather who was having struggles with ng things. I saw this as an opportunity to have a little fun and play with some JavaScript. It has an array of things and when you click the button it returns one item from the array when you need a laugh and a break from writing code. It was well received.

check-it: Checkit is a CLI tool that queries files for certain things that the user is looking for and gets a response as to how many instances of that “thing” there is, line number, and code block. It also comes with log symbols, colored console logs, and messages. It was built, with help from my buddy TJ, using Node and ES6.

Bulp!: Bulp is a basic Gulp build system with basic tasks to get a Web or hybrid mobile project off the ground.

GitHub stats for the year:

2017 Goals

This year I have a lofty set of goals and I hope to achieve all of them. These goals are all dev related.

• Submit to all the conferences that I can.
• Start and finish more projects that I have on the back burner.
• Level up my JS skills big time. I have to find a way for it to click.
• More community involvement.
• Write more blog posts about Web development and things that interest me in the industry.
• Start my podcast.
• Be featured on a web development podcast.
• Write for a magazine or web dev blog.