My 2022 round-up
Happy Hogmanay, New Year, or January depending on what you celebrate!
This is a wrap-up of my year, which has been extremely busy for me. It's mostly for myself to look back on, but if you're interested then great!
I didn't used to 'get' round-up/wrap-up posts, but over the past year I've got into journalling and taking note of what I've been doing so I can look back on it. A post like this suddenly makes sense now I realise it's primarily for me to look back on—not to show off!
State of the Browser Conference
The big thing for me was speaking at the State of the Browser conference in London. There I gave a talk called "Creative web: Building dynamic websites for work and play". It was my first experience speaking at a conference, and it was absolutely fantastic. The organisers, other speakers and attendees were so welcoming, friendly and helpful and I owe a massive thank you to all of them.
The recording will be available soon, but my slides are public now if you're interested! I'll also be giving an improved version again in future so watch out for that!
A particular shout-out to Bruce Lawson for his kind and touching advice on where to aim if I needed to projectile vomit. ❤️
My work at Series Eight
It has been a great year for working at Series Eight, I've been involved in some awesome projects, interesting technical challenges, and some really exciting changes in the company. We've got a fantastic team that I am loving working with, and I finally got to meet them for our team trip in Portugal back in September (the disadvantage of working remotely)!
One thing I'm particularly thrilled with about our work over 2022 is how we're really taking the accessibility of our sites seriously. It's a slow process updating old sites and putting a greater priority on it in our processes, but change is coming and I'm so happy to be working somewhere that cares.
At the end of this year I was also promoted to Lead Developer of the team, starting when we return in January! It'll be a new challenge doing a bit more management and admin rather than just coding, but I'm looking forward to working to support the team.
My work - development, speaking and blogs
I've done a bit more open-source and side projects this year than previous, particularly working on my project Async Alpine. Check that out if you haven't already, it's a library for Alpine.js that supercharges component loading and I am so proud of it. Thanks to the SeriesEight team and GitHub contributors for suggestions and feedback!
This year I also built Cead Consent and Sailwind. Cead consent is a GDPR/cookie/tracking consent manager that handles enabling/disabling tracking scripts and pixels for your users. Sailwind is a fluid spacing utility generator for TailwindCSS, I'm pretty excited about the potential it offers for translating designs. Both are open-source and I've got some plans for them both coming up!
Recently with my growing distaste for Twitter I've started helping with and contributing towards Tweetback, a tool to host your tweet archive. I've made a handful fo contributions so far but I'm very keen to continue to help out and make it easier for people to own their content.
In speaking, other than at State of the Browser I've spoken about Image CDNs on quite a few occasions. I did several meet-ups earlier in the year and even a Twitch stream! A big thanks to everyone who hosted events I've spoken at over 2022.
Finally, I've written some blog posts I'm really happy with! Here's the list in reverse order:
- My comments to Competition and Markets Authority on mobile browser competition
- Code Splitting in Alpine.js
- Async Alpine — Asynchronous Alpine component loading
- SVG generative mountain ridge dividers
- Managing tracking consent with Cead Consent
Personal life
Like many people—and the year in general—2022 was a bit of a rollercoaster for me. There's been some rough spots but this post is focusing on the positives!
Although Covid is of course still ongoing, with some care I've managed to meet up with friends I mostly hadn't seen since pre-pandemic which has been the highlight of my year. We went on a holiday to Dubrovnik, Croatia together and when this post is published I'm hosting people for a new years party.
Earlier this year I made myself a goal to climb every hill in the Pentlands over 400m, a range of hills near Edinburgh. There's 52 in total and I've managed to get through 24 this year. Those are the easy ones though, getting many of the remaining ones will end up being a bit tricky!
Despite not going abroad I've managed to get out skiing a fair bit this year! I went up to Glenshee several times at the end of last season and managed a day before christmas this season. So excited to get up there more this year!
This is the obligatory note that I've moved from Twitter to Mastodon which has been a breath of fresh air. I'm really enjoying the 'Fedi-verse', if you haven't switched already come join us!
Also I'm dying my hair blue now, why did no one tell me it was this easy before?!
Music, Games, Books and Podcasts
I've watched, played, listened to and read so much great stuff this year I want to share!
Music
It's been a brilliant year for music for me! These are releases I've loved that came out in 2022:
- Night Flight: Crazy (Work On Me) — I utterly adore Night Flight, they're probably my favourite band ever and the two songs on this release are brilliant. I can not be more excited for their next album!
- Yumi Zouma: Present Tense — Fantastic chill indie pop, seeing them live in King Tut's in Glasgow was one of the best gigs I've ever been to;
- Gang of Youths: angel in realtime — this one took me by surprised, becoming one of my favourite albums this year in a matter of days;
- Barrie: Barbara — I love chill indie pop, and Barrie nails it perfectly;
- White Lies: As I try not to fall apart;
- Pale Waves: Unwanted;
- Everything Everything: Raw Data Feel;
- Conan Grey: Superache.
Games
I played a bunch of short indie games this year that were astounding. I'll save the commentary for only the top few but I'd love to speak about any with you if you'd like! Not all of them were released in 2022 but I played them all for the first time this year:
- Strange Horticulture — I'm a sucker for a story-heavy occult game, add mystery elements and set it in the lake district? One of my favourite games ever made;
- The Case of the Golden Idol — whodunnit mystery that's genuinely challenging with beautiful pixel graphics;
- The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe — I loved the first game and this adds a similar experience but totally new. Perfect;
- Hades;
- Behind the Frame;
- I am Dead;
- The Artful Escape;
- Genesis Noir;
- Grand Mountain Adventure;
- Superliminal;
- What remains of Edith Finch;
- Gorogoa;
- Valheim;
- The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.
Books
I mostly consume books in the form of audiobooks, but I'll put them in one list with physical books! The top couple are work-related, the rest my normal reading. Again, not just books that came out this year but just ones I read this year.
- Engineering Management for the rest of us: Sarah Drasner;
- Understanding Privacy: Heather Burns;
- The Spy and the Traitor: Ben MacIntyre;
- Circe: Madeline Miller;
- The song of Achilles: Madeline Miller;
- Storyland, A New Mythology of Britain: Amy Jeffs;
- Persian Fire: Tom Holland;
- The Anarchy: William Dalrymple;
- Dominion: Tom Holland.
Podcasts
Only a couple new ones so here's all of the podcasts I've been listening to, new and old:
