i love that people are tweeting lists of work they're proud of this year! everyone should always do this! if you haven't done it maybe do it! congratulations on all your hard work and successes!

— Adam J. Kurtz (@adamjk) December 22, 2017

I totally agree with this tweet. It’s important to write down what you’re grateful about, what you like as it helps you keep motivated and positive. Usually people to tend to remind only the negative parts 😊. 2017 had quite a lot of “1st time…” for me which involved stepping out of my comfort zone occasionally, which I’m so glad about:

• 1st time talking online (remotely)
• 1st time writing an article for a print press
• 1st time speaking at a conference

But there’s more! So here are some of my personal highlights.

Blogging

I’ve been blogging for exactly 10 years now. I still have all of them in the archive, although I’m going to clean those up very soon as some of them are…well..strange :sweat_smile:. I started to blog as a means to document things for myself & I highly recommend you to start as well. Don’t worry about who’s going to read it, don’t worry about making it perfect. Write for yourself, and you’ll see, soon people will like it. I still remember the 1st time I crossed more than 100 daily visitors :boom:. I’ve continued to blog and I still love it, it helps me learn & get a much better understanding about the things I’m learning or currently dealing with.

Things have changed over the years. I’ve always blogged about things I’m currently focusing on, and as such my blog got more focused on frontend development over the last years, in particular Angular. It undeniably is currently my main focus, but I’m closely following the entire web platform with big interest. In my opinion it’s extremely important to keep an open mind.

Here some mandatory stats towards the end of the year :smiley:.

I’m so happy to see I was able to (hopefully) help so many people. Also reading the feedback in blog comments, or emails I get is so encouraging. Also, this is a super improvement from last year with 60% more sessions and 50% more page views than last year:

1st article for a print press

I’ve written tons of articles, for my own site and other sites. But all of them were digital. Writing an article and then get a printed magazine was kind of special and an interesting experience :smiley:.

Community, Conferences & Public speaking

2017 was awesome community wise.

Conferences attended

I had the opportunity to attend some really cool conferences. I’m so grateful for meeting so many new people 😊.

• AngularCamp in Barcelona, Spain
• JSKongress in Munich, Germany
• NG-BE in Ghent, Belgium

It’s not always easy to find the time (and money) to attend conferences. I usually go there on my own, taking vacation and using my own money. But it’s totally worth it and companies should send their people to at least one conference a year. And if you get the chance to attend one, please, please speak to other attendees. It might be weird to get into a conversation initially, but attending confs is really about people, not even so much about the talks there (most often you can watch them later on Youtube). Making new friends and connections is so much more worth.

Public speaking

One of my main goals for 2017 was to be more publicly visible, through speaking engagements mainly. I love to speak, the very same way as I do with blogging. You learn so much when you prepare for it, when you rehearse it with some mates and I kinda like to prepare presentations. But it’s though. I especially struggle to come up with topics I think might be relevant and interesting for others as I find them often to be too basic. But then, when I see others present those very same topics, I like them :smiley:.

• Testing with Angular - Some Recipes
• Angular Air 110 - The TIL Episode #3
• NG-BE 2017 - Create and Publish Angular Libs like a PRO
  My 1st conference talk btw :bangbang: :boom: :sunglasses:

Becoming a GDE

This was one of my major highlights this year. I feel so honored and “impostor syndrome” is high when I think I’m part of this group of amazing people.

But it obviously highly motivates me to continue push out new content. Btw, Aaron Frost aka @js_dev has written some nice posts about what GDEs are. But I especially like his blog post about “Become a Bridge Builder”, containing lots of advices which everyone should follow.

Becoming an Egghead.io Instructor

I started with producing video content around 2 years ago. My 1st experience was for Packt Publishing for which I created a course on Learning Angular Directives with a 2nd edition at the beginning of this year. I started it as an addition to my writing activities and I very much enjoyed it.

Getting invited to become an Egghead.io instructor this year in May was a super cool occasion for me to continue my new passion of producing video content. Since then I’ve published a couple of courses, the last 3 just a week ago. In case you can take a look at all of my on my Egghead instructor profile page. And I totally love it. The team over at Egghead is so welcoming, helping you out whenever you need and you are completely free to organize yourself, what you wanna publish and when. Therefore, totally expect more to come very soon 😉.

New Job & Freelance training

Finally, 2017 was also the year I changed my job. I’ve been working for 9 years at a large 100+ company in the role of the software architect and tech lead. I’ve been coding full-stack, .Net / Java but lately especially on the front-end side. It was my first job after my university studies. I learned a lot but things changed in the last years. You know the book “Who moved my cheese”? It pretty much sums it up. You should read it!
I now work at R3-GIS. We’re in the GIS space, creating awesome (Angular powered) web and mobile applications. Get in touch if you’re interested 😉.

Another of my 2017 goals was to get into freelance consulting. I love to work with people, teach them new stuff and see them getting better. It’s so inspiring and (yea I know everyone tells you that, but) you learn so much yourself. Best way to grow IMHO. That said, I successfully started to hold workshops at companies. But it was kind of occasional and not something I was actively seeking, but rather people approaching me directly. It’s definitely something I want to try out and push further in 2018.

2018?

Well, it’s going to be hard to beat 2017, but I’ll try :smiley:. I definitely want to..

• ..write more articles/blog posts on a more regular basis
• ..talk at some conferences
• ..publish more Egghead.io courses & lessons
• ..do more community work
• ..push my freelance activities (video courses, consulting, training,…)
• ..rocket start at my new job (after all I’ve only been there for ~a month so far 😉)

These things will go into my 13 weeks planning (more in a later post on that) and we’ll see what comes out at the end.

Well, that’s it. Wish you an awesome start into 2018!!