2017’s summary
My annual summary of what happened, what’s achieved and what’s planned for future
The end of the year. For me it means I have to summarize things up and write a post about everything that happened to me this year.
At the beginning of the year I set these goals:
So, let’s see if I did what I wanted to did and what happened besides that.
Well, I’ve started my year with sending the proposal for Rolling Scopes 2017 conference. I’ve crossed the deadline, but organizers applied the talk, so it was decided that I’m going to speak about “Shells written in JavaScript” in Minsk.
I promised when spaceship-zsh-theme will rich 200 stars on GitHub, it get it’s own logo. Даниил Пронин proposed his help, so in January 5th we had our new logo:
With growing of functionality, 🚀🌟 Spaceship ZSH start to lack of speed, so I started my experiments in order to write the main functionality in some high-level language, and write adapters that would smooth out the differences in functionality to all the necessary shells and platforms.
KyivJS Meetup
I decided to have a lightning talk about my Ukrainian translation of “Understanding ES6” book, that I’d just finished to translate. I’ve published two last appendix of the book right on the scene of the meet-up.
There was a lot of applauses and KyivJS Community gave me a ticket to React Amsterdam 2017:
No doubt, that was a huge surprise for me.
ƛ LambdaBooks
After translation of a single book, the project couldn’t remain as it was. We had to move forward — that’s how ƛ LambdaBooks has been born. You can read more about it right here (in Ukrainian):
Right after the announcement Serhiy Giba has joined us with his translation of “The Little Book Of Ruby”:
Roman Liutikov joined us too with his idea of translation “ClojureScript Unraveled” book:
Start dating with Marry
One of the most important events was that I’ve started dating Marry. We known each other for about a year, but at some point we’ve just started to talk much more and spend more time together, so that’s what’s happened:
P.S: And yeah, I’m the guy who got out of the friendzone 😄
Rolling Scopes Conference 2017
Then Rolling Scopes Conference 2017 happened. Definitely, one of the best conferences: great venue, great speakers, a lot of networking.
I finally meet face-to-face with Ivan Akulov (you have to subscribe to his twitter and check his blog about React and Webpack stuff).
NodeSchool Chernivtsi #4
I’m holding the NodeSchool Chernivtsi chapter. Our forth event was all bout HTML, Markdown and Git. We don’t have much photos from that event, but believe me, we did this. Here’s a photo from my personal archive:
React Amsterdam 2017
You know that I had a gift from KyivJS Community — the ticket to the React Amsterdam 2017. That was my opportunity to attend the biggest React conference in the world. You think I used that opportunity? Nope. I didn’t get a visa to the Netherlands.
Easy to get easy to lose 🤦
GitHub Maintainers
At June 2, I got the invite to join GitHub Maintainer Community:
It’s an great honor for me to join such community of developers. The joining to the community opened the life-long free private repos, the closed forum for the maintainers and early-access features of GitHub. Huge thanks for this opportunity!
ChernivtsiJS #3 Conference
At June 10, we had our ChernivtsiJS #3 Conference — the even that we worked on for a quite long time. We did a great job and I’ve got a lot of experience organizing a logistic, negotiating with sponsors, speakers and venue holders.
Thanks for our team:
Also, huge thanks to our speakers, volunteers, sponsors and everyone who attend this conference. We hope you enjoyed!
P.S: If you want to give a talk in 2018, just ping me 😉
OdessaJS 2017
At July 1–2, I had my talk at OdessaJS 2017. Last year it was the first conference I attended in my life. This year I had my own talk here.
I had a talk about “Cross-shell prompts in JavaScript”. Here’s my slides:
By the way, it was a great pleasure to spend some time on the beach, swim in the sea and chill-out in the city. Enjoy the pano that I’ve took on the beach in the southern part of the city:
wtfjs
After OdessaJS 2017 I had kinda vacations at village with my grandparents. I do this every year. Two weeks without Internet, with fresh air, books, trainings and activity. The lack of the Internet forced me to collect my examples of quirks and unexpectable behavior of JavaScript. I dug the specification to explain and justify it, made a list in the GitHub repository and posted it on Twitter.
It has got the first thousand of stars in 24 hours.
I’ve found myself in the top trends of GitHub, JavaScript Weekly and other mailing lists.
At the end of the year wtfjs has more that 10K stars and it is one of the most sharable links of 2017 by JavaScript Daily:
🚀🌟 Spaceship ZSH
At the beginning of the year it had only 200 stars. Then it had 1K in June. Now it ends year with more than 2K. It’d grown a lot, there were new features and some refactoring. Here you can read about 2.0 version:
3.0 is still WIP. I didn’t have much time and inspiration to work on it, but I can say that you should await for this release at the beginning of the 2018.
Huge thanks to Salmanul Farzy for his help to maintain this project! Thanks for everyone who opened an issues, send a PR or just use this prompt!
NodeSchool Chernvitsi #5
The latest NodeSchool Chernivtsi event was on October 14. At this time we had workshoppers about ES2015+ and functional programming. Here are some photos:
To be honest, after this event I feel some doubts in NodeSchool. It’s not interesting anymore for people and they need something else. We will have some experiments with ChernivtsiJS workshop’s format in 2018.
KharkivJS 2017
In this year I had a talk about VR in Kharkiv. Here is my talk:
Also as always, we had a nice party at Kirill Yakovenko’s home. Asim Hussain and Aleksandar Simovic was there too — I was glad to meet you guys 😄
Kottans Chernivtsi Frontend Course 2017
Whole November I’ve spend organizing our Kottans course. Teaching people is not so easy. We’ve developed our own teaching program, had lectures, workshops, YouTube recordings and live-streams — everything what good course should have. All of our materials are in the GitHub repo:
The feedback was more than positive, so propably you should await for our course in 2018.
Inboxer
I wanted to build an Electron application for a long time. At the beginning of November I’ve started to use Inbox by Gmail. Didn’t find useful cross-platform client for that, so I’ve decided to build my own. Here it is:
Conclusions
I didn’t mention a lot. You shouldn’t think that everything was so good. No, it wasn’t. There were sadness, disappointment, fury and other bad things. But what’s important is to keep balance between good things and bad things. 2017 was a good year and I’m hoping for the best in following one.
If we step back for my 2017’s goals, here are results:
- ✅ Find a girlfriend — Yes, I found one and I’m goddamn happy to have her support. There was no need to find her, ‘cause she’s already been with me for a long time.
- ❌ Get driver’s license — No, I didn’t get it. I planned to start going to the driver school but postponed this for better times.
- ✅ Organize a conference and meet-ups — ChernivtsiJS Conference, few NodeSchool workshops and frontend course for beginners.
- ✅ More talks at conferences — yes, I had more talks this year. I’ve learned to be not afraid to send a proposal to the conference.
- ✅ More traveling — that was the year when I’ve been abroad for first time. I also traveled a lot in Ukraine, so I can check this as done.
Goals for 2018
I want to spend more time for myself to grow as a professional. Learning more computer science basics such as patterns and algorithms is an important step to become a strong professional. More blogging is important for self-promotion around, so I definitely should invest some time in that. Getting a drive license — is a task from the 2017 and it should be completed anyway. More organizing means that I want to make events that I organize better. Better self-management is a problem for everyone, but that’s the only way to deal with lack of time. More traveling is important to meet new people, to find more experience to learn more about the world and my country. And finally, I need to find a company or project that worth time that is spent for it, because life is short and I don’t want to spend it just to make someone bu me richer and happier.
In numbers
- ❤️ 11 months of relationships with Marry
- 🔄 2,268 contributions on GitHub (1,749 last year)
- ⭐️ 16К stars on GitHub (~3К last year)
- 🎫 5 conferences (3 talks)
- 🎤 10 meet-ups (6 talks)
- 🏛 8 cities
- 💙 684 followers on Twitter (+184)
Thanks everyone who was with me in 2017! Hope we are going to have amazing 2018!
This post is only about key events related to my projects. I’ve write more about personal life for friends on my Facebook page.
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