A look back at 2018 and all I have achieved
I am not a big fan of writing about myself and what I have achieved and sometimes people look down on it as if your showing off or trying to prove your better than others. But success is something to be celebrated, not hidden, and to be honest I write this more to help me see and believe what I have achieved and to look back on how far I have come.
So where do I start? 2018 has been an incredible year. I graduated from both my tech degrees. A frontend tech degree with OpenClassrooms and a Full Stack tech degree with Treehouse. I also graduated from the University of Dundee in Scotland with a distinction in Spanish. I had never been to uni before so to graduate with an official uni degree was quite something.
I also graded for my fourth degree taekwondo black belt exam in London. An exam that lasted 7 hours of which I enjoyed every single minute of it. I had put in a lot of work and I was ready for it and in November at the awards night I was officially presented with the certificate.
In may I attended my first ever conference Build Stuff thanks to a free ticket from a work colleague. I had already had plans for that weekend and had to cancel them to attend the conference. I was so glad I did. Some amazing talks including one on how to banish your inner critic by Denise Jacobs, exactly what I needed. It was here that I spoke about my own fears about being a speaker and why I thought I wasn’t good enough to be one.
I attended another conference, JSCamp —JavaScript Conference in Barcelona and also attended a webpack workshop with Sean T. Larkin. I attended the most amazing meetup ever with Sean T. Larkin and Eduardo San Martin Morote which was my first ever intro to Vue.js and it was not only the best meetup ever but it was what made me fall in love with Vue.js and see how easy it was to set up and use. And oh my god did I mention Vue CLI!
I made my first contribution ever to open source, webpack, and managed to win a place on a 5 day Kyle Simpson course on JavaScript at trivago in Dusseldorf. What an amazing week and not only did I learn so much but also had a great time with such amazing people and such impressive offices.
I continued contributing to webpack and wrote the why webpack page and ended up being officially added to the webpack contribution team.
At work we built our own framework from scratch which was an a amazing learning experience and this framework is still being used by the company today.
I was selected to be a speaker at Build Stuff Lithuania to speak about the framework we had built. It was such an honor to have been chosen and to have had the opportunity to share my experience and also I met some of the most amazing people there too Jeff Strauss, Matthew Renze, Jonathan Mills…
I started a new job as Frontend Team Lead in todoPatterson, a digital agency in Palma, a new role with new challenges where I am not only leading the frontend team but also responsible for the frontend department.
I attended 8 meet ups throughout the year and organized my first one with none other than special guest Sean T. Larkin who gave a fantastic talk on webpack and we were also lucky enough to avail of Sean’s time and knowledge through a workshop on webpack as well as an analysis of our code and how we could better use webpack.
I wrote 12 blog posts all tech related.
I passed my Microsoft exam and became officially Microsoft certified in HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
I became a mentor for OpenClassrooms and a slack moderator and project reviewer for Treehouse.
Anything else?
No I think that’s it 🤪
So what is in store for 2019?
Oh my god I have so many plans and ideas. Some of then are going to take perhaps a few years to achieve but I hope that 2019 will at least lead me in the right direction. Here are my goals:
Contribute more to Open Source especially webpack
Become google certified
Create something cool and Open Source it
Record a workshop on Frontend Masters
Work for Microsoft + Open Source as a consultant traveling the world and fixing people’s code
Contribute to Vue.js and write some stuff for the vue cook book
Write some articles for CSS tricks
Speak at more conferences
Organize more meetups
Travel more
Learn more
Build more
