Not done an end of year post for a while, in fact I’ve not managed to post to my personal blog at all in 2018 which was rather remiss of me!
2018 was a busy year. I’m proud of the great team I’ve built at Studio 24, we got our new website out (finally), though work has had it’s ups and downs. We had a quiet summer & the increased team size has made certain things challenging (though also gives us more opportunity). The web dev world we work in has thrown up a few challenges too, from the poorly communicated and complex introduction of Gutenberg in WordPress 5.0, old JavaScript projects not working in modern browsers (I’m looking at you Angular 1), to the rise of JavaScript frameworks often at the expense of web standards and basic website performance. Feels like we’ve been battling against JavaScript a fair bit this year.
We’re currently in an exciting position with a few exciting new projects due to start in January and some really interesting R&D work I’ve been doing recently which has sparked my interest again in web development.
Family life has been good. The boys Bill and Daniel are enjoying school, I can’t quite believe its Bill’s last year at primary school before he moves up to secondary school this September! We had some good UK-based holidays this year (Topsham, Charmouth, Lewes), a fab family Christmas where we saw all our immediate family (and the kids made lots of noise with their cousins!) and I travelled to Berlin for the first time with friends (lovely city). Kate has been somewhat ridiculously busy this past six months between the Cherry Hinton Festival and Cambridge Film Festival. The Cherry Hinton Festival is planned to be a little smaller this year, to give Kate and the other organisers a bit of a much-needed break.
Things I’d like to do more of in 2019…
- Travel in Europe more, first trip planned to Belgium around Feb-time.
- Have more date nights with Kate, so much of our time is dominated by looking after kids, work and charity work!
- Attend inspiring web conferences, my first is New Adventures.
- Blog more and focus on my current R&D area, which is Headless CMS, web standards and web performance.
- Develop my personal blog, cross-post my posts from the Studio 24 site.
- Do some talks, I have one planned for March on Headless CMS.
- Resist Brexit as much as is possible (and support my 4 European staff through whatever this process brings).
- Be open to new opportunities, meet new people, be friendly and supportive.