2015 - Review

2015 was a good year overall. It was a year of regrouping after a tough 2014. During 2014, I worked on a very stressful project, working 70-90 hours per week for 5 months, and burned out (partially difficult client and partially me being a workaholic). I hit rock bottom around Memorial Day 2014 and vowed to never put myself in that situation again. I focused the past 18 months on a work/life balance and doing things I enjoy (learning new technologies and public speaking). The technologies I had the opportunities to work with in 2015 include AngularJS, iOS and Swift, and ReactJS. I hope to continue expanding my knowledge in those technologies and expand in others in 2016.

2015 Achievements

  • Major projects. I spent the majority of 2015 on three major projects.
    • A single page application hosted in SharePoint using AngularJS 1.4x.
    • An iOS project written in Swift.
    • Small ReactJS project in order to “kick the tires” using ReactJS.
  • AngularJS. I have spent the past 3.5 years developing in AngularJS and really enjoy it. It is a great library for developing single page applications. Furthermore, since I do a lot of work in SharePoint, it is a great library for developing single page applications for SharePoint. In 2015, I had the opportunity to be a tech lead on a 5-month project with an outsourced team. After spending the majority of my team building AngularJS applications as the sole developer, I was working with a team of 3 developers. This provided a great opportunity to design the application to support multiple developers. Really focused on using directives for everything.
  • AngularJS Seed Project. I am a huge fan of John Papa. He is a great teacher and has a similar development methodology as me. As many of the single page applications I build are hosted in SharePoint, I needed a framework which could be repurposed across my team. I took the Hot Towel application and enhanced it to work in SharePoint. This included hooking up a common service for data access with SharePoint lists and styling to work in a SharePoint site. You can find my SharePoint Projects project on my Github.
  • ReactJS. I have always been interested in ReactJS with the amount of coverage it receives. Many of the people I follow on Twitter are ReactJS developers. I spent some time in 2015 reading up on ReactJS and always looked for opportunities to use it on a client project. Last November I was tasked with developing 6 components to be deployed to a SharePoint site with data stored in SharePoint lists. I could have selected any library but went with ReactJS. Wow! I was really impressed from the very beginning. I am a huge fan of the component model.
  • iOS and Swift. I have always been interested in creating iOS applications. I spent some time a few years ago learning Objective C and gave up due to the complexity and not having a Mac hurt as well. Late summer I finally got a Macbook Pro to use. Oh boy! What a joy. The OS X operating system “just works”. All the tools I used on Windows (Brackets, Atom, Code) all work on OS X. I also had the ability to install Xcode and start playing around with Swift. I spent quite a bit of time in the Swift Playground working on different examples. In November I had the opportunity to work on a new iOS project which uses Swift. I can’t say things have gone perfectly; however, it has been the most enjoyable developing time I have had in quite some time.
  • Editors. I came into 2015 using WebStorm. I found it a great editor for developing JavaScript applications. I ran into issues with it with version 10 on my Surface Pro 3 (the resolution was wonky and caused things to be too small to be read). I looked for alternatives and found Brackets. Brackets is a great editor. Simple, great plug-ins, and fast. I used Brackets on my 5-month SPA development. During the past few months I tried out different editors. My favorite editor at the moment is Atom. There are numerous plug-ins, and although it is not the fastest (especially in Settings), it is my preferred editor at the moment.
  • Presentations. After a slow 2014, I had the “bug” to start presenting again. I was able to present at SharePoint Cincinnati, SharePoint Saturday DC, SharePoint Saturday NYC, and SharePoint Engage.
  • Git. I have used Git for the past few years but didn’t push my Git skills too far. On the iOS project, I was tasked with improving my Git skills. Firstly, my co-worker recommended SourceTree. What a great tool! I love being able to create a new feature and have SourceTree create a new branch for me. Secondly, I spent quite a bit of time reading up on Git and learning things in more detail.

2016 Goals

For 2016, my list of goals is ambitious. I would rather aim high and fall short rather than aim low and meet all my objectives.

  • Continue learning vanilla JavaScript including ES6 and ES7.
  • Expand AngularJS knowledge (1.5+ and 2.0).
  • Continue expanding ReactJS knowledge (React and Redux).
  • Build a prototype in React Native.
  • Build knowledge on creating Cloud-Native applications for Azure.
  • Build NodeJS skills.
  • Create 1 iOS/Swift application and deploy to App Store.
  • Update my Building SharePoint Single Page Application using AngularJS presentation to AngularJS 2.0 and ReactJS.
  • Present at 4-6 SharePoint conferences (hopefully SharePoint Cincinnati, SharePoint Saturday DC, SharePoint Saturday NYC, SharePoint Saturday Chicago, SPTechCon Boston, and SharePoint Engage).
  • Write 4 technical blogs.
  • Look for opportunities to present at a non-SharePoint conference.
  • Attend the RWDevCon Conference in March.
  • Create my own ReactJS seed project.
  • Work/life balance.

Happy New Year!

Steve

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Written on December 31, 2015