My 2017
José M. Pérez / December 31, 2017
3 min read • 489 views
This year has been a ride. More blogging and speaking at events than ever, and the feeling that it was well worth it.
Blogging
During 2017 I wrote 18 blog posts. This is a high increase respect 2016.
My post Using SVG as placeholders — More Image Loading Techniques was an unprecedented success. It was widely shared and got the attention of , which spread it even further.
That escalated quickly. From a couple hundred views a day, suddenly it went up to +40k.
The post made it to , renowned sites about frontend articles (, , ), and newsletters (, , React Native Coach).
Most of my work to write that post was about ollecting ideas and examples from very talented developers. I'm happy that lots of developers have found out about them through this post, and I hope this serves to give more attention to their impressive work.
Not only was the SVG post published in the sites I love reading. Some other posts of mine got referenced from , , and .
This is definitely a push for me to continue documenting techniques to improve website performance.
On a broader note, I continued making improvements to this blog. I moved many images to , which scales and reencodes the images to tailor them to the user's device. This resulted in shorter load times, . I should strive for good performance on a site that promotes it.
Open source projects
I built a couple of open-source projects related with Spotify. The first one is a library to interact with Spotify's Connect API called which I described on Playing with the Spotify Connect API. The second one is , a collaborative room where users can propose, vote and listen to music.
Conferences and interviews
This year I spoke at RenderConf in Oxford, JSDayES in Madrid, Alicante Frontend, and Frontfest in Moscow. I also attended React Alicante's first edition, in my home town, which I enjoyed a lot.
I was interviewed by , who works at , the coworking space in Alicante that hosts the meetup . You can .
Something new this year was a podcast I recorded about PWAs with Ignacio and Carmen from , a Spanish podcast about web development and design. I realised I talk too much and I need to sort my ideas a bit better :)
Work
I kept having fun at Spotify working in a fabulous team that builds amongst other projects.
What's next in 2018?
My priorities for 2018 are shifting. I'll spend more time with my family and less time coding and writing. I would like to read more about leading change in organizations and soft skills, and less about the latest CSS and JS news.