My 2018
José M. Pérez / December 30, 2018
3 min read • 569 views
As I expected, this year I have dedicated more time to my family and less to side projects. I have been on parental leave for 7 months and it has been a great time to put things in perspective.
Blogging
During 2018 I wrote 8 blog posts. This is way lower than last year.
The main highlight was that I got to publish a post on Smashing Magazine on user perceived performance. I enjoyed the experience a lot and their support helped me writing posts with a better structure. I also like seeing that it gets referenced in posts like this from Perfplanet's Performance Calendar.
Side projects
I started a project with Joan León (aka @nucliweb) to do performance reviews of web sites and explain our findings as videos. We both like talking about performance and realized that lots of developers don't know where to start when improving it, and lots of stakeholders in general don't give performance the importance it deserves.
The videos are in Spanish and we want to take it as an opportunity to make it easier for a huge community to access knowledge that exists mainly in English. If you are interested in having a look, check out our channel on Youtube.
Conferences
This year I spoke at PiterCSS in Saint Petersburg, ReactJS in Stockholm, GDG in Stockholm, and Codemotion in Madrid.
Certifications
I became a Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies, which got me in contact with an amazing community of developers who are pushing the web forward in different fronts. It's also great to have contacts from Google at hand to know more about their web initiatives.
Work
Parental leave meant changes for me. I came to the conclusion that I wanted to make a professional move after 6+ years working at Spotify. I still don't know if I just loved my work too much or became too attached to some projects I wanted to see succeed (which they did). Truth is that I woke up some day and realized I needed to push myself a bit enough out of my comfort zone, and that would bring positive experiences.
What's next in 2019?
In a few days I will start working at Facebook and I'm excited to take on new challenges. It will be a new role for me, taking a step back from the web, looking at a bigger picture to use technology to unlock business opportunities.
This is a big change for me and I'm looking forward to find out what the future looks like.