I always mean to write a “year in review” post at new year and never get round to it. This is my belated attempt for 2018, only a month or so late!

I’ve been working as a software developer since November 2013, so 2018 marked my 5 year anniversary in this industry 🎉 I’ve made more of an effort to contribute to the community and engage with other developers online this year. This post is a list of what I deem to be achievements in terms of views, likes and time commitments.

I realise that creating a piece of content that gathers a lot of likes or views doesn’t make you successful or good at your job, but Internet Points like this make me feel better on those days when I think “what do I actually do?”.

Achievements unlocked

• I created the @claire_codes Instagram account in January. By the end of the year I had 200 posts and 1700 followers. I engage with the Instagram tech community and they positively engage with me. I like using Instagram to connect with other coders because it’s a supportive area of the Internet, and creating content for it is a fun challenge.
• I started cross-posting on dev.to. I’ve had a blog since 2015 but never publicised it. It’s mostly a pet project only seen by recruiters. I started to cross-post some blog posts to the dev.to site and immediately received a lot of positive engagement on them.
• Sticky sidebar post: the blog post on dev.to and CodePen explaining how to use ‘position: sticky’ gained my most views this year.
• CSS bee CodePen: this was a Picked Pen on CodePen’s homepage for a brief moment! I discovered how much I enjoy working with CSS this year.
• I continued to blog: I nearly accomplished Blogtober (where you publish a post every day in October), and alongside that I’m happy with the quantity and quality of posts I’ve written this year. 37 in total! (find <directory-name> -name <regex>)
• I migrated my blog from Jekyll to Hugo and designed a theme from scratch: it was time for a change, and although it’s not the best-looking blog in the world, at least I built it all myself. The GitHub repo is here.
• I attended 3 conferences: UpFront conf in Manchester (March), dotCSS in Paris (November) (I won the ticket through a WomenWhoCode ticket giveaway) and HalfStack in London (November) (I was given the ticket by an Instagram friend who could no longer attend). I love going to conferences, not for the networking opportunities (I barely ever speak to anyone) but for the talks, and always come away inspired.
• I attended a handful of meetups in Manchester after work, although the frequency dwindled after new year. I’m still on the fence about meetups and whether I get value out of them.
• I published an Atom package to colour code the files in the tree view called rainbow tree

I feel like I should list things that I didn’t accomplish in 2018, but I want to keep this post positive and celebrate the things I did do. Done is better than nothing at all and all that.

Non-internet points

It’s not just about code!

• I bought a house
• I celebrated my one year wedding anniversary
• I travelled to 7 cities/islands in 5 different countries: Hamburg (Germany), Gran Canaria and Madrid (Spain), Reykjavik (Iceland), Nice and Paris (France) and Monaco.

I don’t want to set any goals for 2019 as they tend to make me get wrapped in numbers rather than enjoying myself, so let’s see what this year brings!