2019 year in review

I managed to achieve in 2019 much more of what I’ve done in 2018, here’s an overview of what I have learned, created & some random facts.

Learning

Dev

• React hooks
• React native navigation
• React native config
• Fastlane
• SSR, static SSR, CSR, Pre-rendering
• Styled-system
• Theme UI
• ZEIT now
• Semantic commits
• Removed redux & recompose, switched to Hooks & Context API.
• Tried React VR (360)
• Tried Ruby and Ruby on rails
• Configuring Nginx, redirecting http to https after generating and adding the SSL cert
• Circle & Travis CI
• Detox and cypress for e2e testing
• testing-library (for React and React native)
• Apollo client
• Airtable
• Contentful
• GraphQL
• Tried Docker
• Pagination with mongoose-paginate
• tried Redis
• Mixpanel
• tried Sinatra

Life

• Decisions are made based on:
  • The environment
  • Experience
  • Bias & intuition
• Team & project management
• Laundry & cooking
• Negotiating
• Saying “No”
• Expenses/Income management
• Being rich isn’t being wealthy
• Giving a good feedback

Design

• UX can be improved based on analytics & user behavior using tracking events
• Wireframing is an important milestone
• Design systems
• Little experiment I did, CSS in GraphQL

Creating

• Contributed in building 3 platforms at my previous job, Barmej, Pawp & a foundation’s website that support up to 6 languages using Gatsby & Contentful as a headless CMS while working for Obytes.
• Continued adding features, fixing bugs & improving Beaf until I decided to shut it down and open source the code bases.
• Built & shipped Ai Hashtags, an Android & iOS app to generate precise hashtags from your pictures & Instagram posts.Contributed more to Gatsby & few other JavaScript libraries, got some free swag in return.
• Decided & managed to write an article a month, that’s a total of 12 articles!
• Gave 3 talks about Gatsby js, in Casablanca & Penang island.
• Mentored few folks on Twitter who managed to get their first jobs.
• Created react-flex-ready
• Created a Gatsby theme gatsby-theme-portfolio
• Bunch of Gatsby starters

Random facts

• Resigned from my first job, after 2.3 years working as a remote front-end developer
• Replaced my Nexus 6p phone with Google Pixel 2
• Traveled to Southeast Asia for 2.5 months, visiting Kuala Lumpur, Penang in Malaysia and Bali in Indonesia.
• Visited grandma
• Joined a new company as a full stack developer.
• Fell in love
• Got the opportunity to talk with ZEIT’s CEO who’s also the creator of mongoose & socket.io along with his team, to try out ZEIT now & share my honest feedback, then they decided to sponsor one of their community meetups here in Morocco.
• Moved from my parents’ basement to a new place, got a new monitor, desk (adjustable height), chair & macBook pro.
• Got many offers which I declined in a respectful way but recommended my friends who I trust could do a great job.
• First time invited to speak at a Moroccan podcast about the JAM stack
• Started working part time for Elliot as a JavaScript developer
• Made 2515 contributions on GitHub

Data about my blog during 2019

• 57 312 page views 👀
• 20 508 users 📈
• 5032 are based in 🇺🇲
• 2536 🇫🇷
• 1630 🇩🇪
• 15 501 use Chrome
• 2460 use Safari
• 5992 use Windows
• 4882 use Macintosh
• 3721 use Linux
• 3483 use Android
• 2276 use iOS

Will keep editing this article until January ends I usually do.