Year in Review 🥳

I’ve never written a year in review, but decided that so much happened in 2020 it was worth taking a look back and reflecting.

Cypress

I started at Cypress at the end of January and it has been a wild, amazing ride since then. The year ended with my recent promotion to a Technical Account Manager AND the announcement of our Series B funding of $40 million! I have loved getting to talk to our users about their experiences, helping them solve problems, and providing guidance on their test strategy.

I’ve also been very fortunate to get to participate in some great events representing Cypress, including Ioniconf and Enterprise NG. I am incredibly excited about what the new year will bring. By the way, if you are passionate about helping people build quality software, Cypress is hiring!

Speaking

I started off the year with a string of speaking opportunities in February, thanks to the support of the Atlanta tech community. (Special shout-out to Angel Banks from Women Who Code Atlanta, who encouraged me to give more technical talks despite my self-doubts).

My first conference talk was at ng-ALT/DevNexus on using Node and the GitHub API to increase developer productivity. From there, I’ve been fortunate to speak at the following events:

Women Who Code: Node.js and Github API to Increase Productivity
Coders Craft Dev Meetup: The Road to Junior Dev - What and How to Learn
Ioniconf: End-to-end Testing Mobile Apps with Ionic and Cypress
ThisDot JS Marathon: End-to-end Testing with Cypress
Women Who Code: Tech Talk Speaker Workshop
Cypress.io UK Community: Exploring the Cypress Real World App
Enterprise NG: Testing NgRx Actions and Effects with Cypress
EnterpriseNG: Workshop - Testing Angular Applications with Cypress
WWC Connect Forward: Unpacking the Nuxt Content Module
Cypress: Introduction to the Cypress Dashboard

Links to the videos and slides (where available) are here on my personal site.

Writing

I didn’t do a lot of writing this year (aside from emails and tweets 😅), but I did contribute a few blog posts, including:

Projects

Outside of work, I spent a lot of time this year learning Vue and Ionic, and am incredibly excited about both frameworks. These are some projects I worked on through the year and will continue to develop next year.

ceceliacreates-nuxt (Nuxt, Vue, Vuetify, Netlify)
ballot-cure + ballot-api (Ionic, Vue, Netlify Function, Express)
project-folio (Vue, Vuetify, Firebase)
ionic-bow (Ionic, React, Typescript)

Goals for 2021 📝

Reading

I do a lot of reading and absorb a lot of content, but not much of it is actual books. I have a goal for 2021 to be more “well-read”, especially with literature, philosophy, and political theory. I have a goal to read 15 books this year. It may seem modest, but some of them will take some effort to get through and I want to plan for consistency over speed. If you want to help keep me honest, you can join me on Goodreads (very open to recommendations as well!)

Blogging

Based on some good advice from Sam Julien’s newsletter and highly-recommended book "Getting Started in Developer Relations", I’m going to focus on publishing shorter blog posts on a consistent schedule. My goal is to post one blog per week, some of which may be combined into larger series. The goal here is published, not perfect.

I’ll be blogging throughout December covering some of my most common tasks in GitHub. You can see my posts on my personal blog as well as Dev.to!

Streaming

Following along with the theme of consistency, I plan to use streaming as a way to keep me moving forward on my side projects. These will be unstructured working sessions and give me a chance to get feedback, show what I’m working on, and better develop ideas for future video content. My goal is to stream at least one hour twice a week, but not necessarily on a strict schedule.

I’ll also be doing my best to join more streams as a viewer! There are so many great live coders out there and I have a lot to learn from them. Here are some great streams I've watched recently:

I won’t have a set schedule just yet, but will always post on Twitter before I go live. You can also follow me on Twitch to receive stream notifications and watch the recordings.

Community

I’m involved with two organizations that support underrepresented people in tech -- Women Who Code and Out in Tech. I love both of these organizations and want to continue my small part in building these great communities.

Out in Tech

Obviously things changed a lot in 2020 with a shift toward online for events and communication. This means that the nature of what I do with Out in Tech is shifting from organizing events in Atlanta to contributing where I can as needed across the entire organization.

For 2021, this will include joining some new committees, as well as better promoting engagement in the #atlanta and #atlanta-jobs channels on the Out in Tech Slack. If you are interested in learning more about Out in Tech, check out their website or DM me!

Women Who Code Front End

The weekly Front-End Fridays Slack Study Group has changed a lot throughout the year, and in an effort to improve engagement and consistency (there’s that word again!), we’ll be using a more standard weekly topic format. Stay tuned for more information before January.

You can join the study group by joining the #frontend-friday channel on the Women Who Code Front End Slack.

I’ll also continue to speak and contribute to Women Who Code events whenever possible! It’s my absolute favorite community for speaking because all our members are so engaged and have awesome questions. We are always looking for speakers and can provide support for first timers! Again, please feel free to DM me if you have any questions or would like to get involved!

Wrapping Up 🎁

On a personal note, I’ll also be making more of an effort to talk to friends, get rest, move around, and be kind to myself. 2020 has reinforced how important health is, especially mental health, and making that more of a priority is top of the list.

Thank you to everyone who read, watched, commented, listened, encouraged, retweeted, commiserated, and inspired me this year. You all are a part of my journey and my success, and I’m incredibly grateful to have such an awesome community behind me.

Happy New Year!

My 2020 Year in Review