My colleague's drawing of me in 2015.
I haven't written end of year accounts regularly but this time I thought I'd write one for 2015. Working as front-end developer involves lots of changes on a regular basis as the community keeps pushing the boundaries. It's been a busy year!
Work
Most of 2015, I worked in a small and highly skilled team at Podio/Citrix building Beagle, a tool for agencies for creating and reusing proposals. It was a good opportunity to learn about product design/development and work with a modern web stack, and establish a good architecture around it with React, Flux, ES6, BEM, node and webpack. I created a modular Style Guide for the product as well which really helped in maintaining a consistent UI.
Towards the end of the year the future of the product became unclear so I felt a change was necessary. So I quit Podio in October, and in November joined Bownty, a Danish startup providing online to offline deal curation service in hundreds of cities in multiple countries. As Lead Front-End Developer, I'm responsible for modernizing their front-end stack and related tooling, making the site responsive, and making the case for usability and accessibility as we obviously want to provide a good experience to as many consumers as possible. A good work atmosphere, solid business model, and a chance to work on many different areas with new tech with great colleagues make Bownty a great place, so I'm quite excited about it!
Side projects
Outside work hours, I've spent time with a number of small side projects and starter templates, mostly on GitHub. These include setups for jspm/systemjs, ES6/Babel, React, Sass, webpack, ES6/Babel, Sass, and React unit tests with Mocha, jsdom, unexpected and SinonJS. Nothing ground-breaking, compiled from different sources around the community, but helpful in getting hands-on with new stuff. I'm maintaining my front-end dev bookmarks as well, and reading a lot.
Conferences
During 2015, I attended three web conferences in Europe: ReactConf Europe in Paris, HybridConf in Dublin and ColdFront in Copenhagen. Good content and food for thought in all of them. Looking forward to meeting new inspiring people at conferences (and elsewhere!) in 2016.
Mobile photography
I've been using Flickr since 2007, but this year I finally joined Instagram and VSCO too. These services are a lot of fun to use (but it's sometimes hard to choose between those filters and not overuse them).
With that, bring on 2016!