My 2016

José M. Pérez

José M. Pérez / December 31, 2016

2 min read156 views

I don't usually post a summary of the year, but I'm particularly happy about how 2016 developed and want to do balance. It's been very positive, both personally and professionally, and hope 2017 will be even better.

Blogging

During this year I wrote 8 blog posts. It's not a big number since I only write when I feel like I have something to share, often related to projects at work.

I migrated this blog from Jekyll to Hexo, which I feel quite comfortable with. Jekyll was great but I wanted to have more control on the generation of the posts, and I'm not that familiar with python and the ecosystem of gems. With Hexo I also added support for Google's AMP. My site has great performance, but AMP makes it load even faster from Google search results.

I also decided to import my blog posts on Medium. This allows me to be on that platform while keeping the canonical content on my site.

The most visited posts on the blog during 2016 have been:

  1. How Medium does progressive image loading
  2. Optimizing images for web with Google Page Speed and jpegoptim
  3. Using WebP to create tiny preview images

It is clear that images and their role in web performance are the most interesting content on the blog.

Open source projects

I contributed to DuckDuckGo with a small Spice Instant Answer that fetches results from Spotify, created a proof-of-concept universal wrapper for Spotify using ES6 and a proxy desktop app to make it easy to work with authenticated endpoints. Last, but not least, a fun project to record the screen and webcam using browser APIs.

Conferences

This year I attended FullStack 2016 in London and spoke at CSSConf/JSConf/Decompress Australia 2016. It had been 3 years since I spoke at Spain.js 2013 and it was great to go through that stress and nerves of speaking to a large audience, and I came back with good memories from Melbourne.

Work

This year was my forth one at Spotify and I worked in a couple of projects that I am enjoining a lot. Hopefully I will be able to share more on those in the coming months.