Nick TaylorWell, it's been a year! And you know what that means. Time for my year in review.
Work
New beginnings
After almost two and a half years at Forem, the software that powers dev.to, I decided to move on to new challenges.
My first day at Netlify was April 4th, and it's been fun and challenging ever since!
Offsite
It's not why I joined Netlify, but I won't lie; having an offsite in Hawaii was pretty sweet!
I got to meet all my co-workers and enjoy some downtime. I was floating in the Pacific with my entire team at one point. I highly recommend meetings in the ocean.
Layoffs
Unfortunately, like many tech companies, even Netlify was not immune to layoffs. 16% of the company was laid off. I made the cut, but it's a weird feeling making the cut. I'm still happy to be working at Netlify, and life goes on, but it's been weird getting back to whatever "normal" is. Having said that, I'm still super excited about the stuff we're working on.
Content Creation
Talks
I gave a bunch of talks this year and was even on a panel!
Tools for web developers: Live coding and debugging
Virtual Coffee Lunch & Learn: Asking Coding Questions
Automate syndication and ownership of your content with Eleventy
Expert Panel: Trending Tools and Frameworks โ What's Hype and What's Not
Fresh: A New Full Stack Web Framework for Deno
If you want the slide decks and additional info or want to check out previous talks, head on over to my Talks page.
Streaming on Twitch
I did my last stream for dev.to, and then around the end of April, I started putting some love into my own Twitch stream. Although I loved doing the dev.to Twitch stream with my co-worker Christina; I had neglected my own channel for about two years. ๐ฌ
I re-kickstarted my own stream and was happy with how it turned out. From a numbers perspective, even though I don't care as much about this as my lizard brain does, I went from about 100 followers to what I currently have, 425 followers. Thanks to everyone who thought my airtime was worth the watch, and a big thanks to my subscribers.
And lastly, a big thank you to all the guests! ๐๐ป
If you want to check out all the streaming I do, check out my streaming page.
All streams end up on my YouTube channel, so you know the drill. Hit that subscribe button. ๐ Check out great content like this interview with Deno core member Luca Casonato, walking me through Fresh, a new full-stack web framework for Deno.
Twitch Stream Guest
Aside from streaming on my own Twitch channel, I was also a guest on a few streams. Thanks for having me Deepgram, Jenn Junod, and Anthony Campolo!
Twitter Spaces
I listen to Twitter Spaces somewhat frequently and sometimes I'm also a speaker. I can't remember all the Twitter Spaces I spoke at, but here's a couple I spoke on:
Frontend Fun: JS Frameworks and Deployment Platforms
Hacktoberfest Getting Started Q & A
There's a bunch more on my Polywork if you want to check them out over there.
Podcasting
I dipped my toes into the world of podcasting. I started repurposing content from my streams in audio format.
The podcast is still pretty new, but I've had a lot of fun pulling out what I think are great conversations from my Twitch stream and putting them in podcast format. Here's the latest episode with chantastic. Loved this conversation with Chan!
Pandemic life, Storybook, Chromatic, remote work and so much more with Chantastic
This is a great conversation that Michael Chan a.k.a. Chantastic and Nick Taylor had on Nick's Twitch stream before diving into live coding with Storybook and Chromatic.They discuss remote work life, the pandemic, community, Storybook origins, why...
nickscuts.buzzsprout.com
Podcast Guest
I was also a podcast guest on a couple of podcasts. Thanks again for having me Eddie and Candost!
- webjoy.fm S1 E9: We're like Detectives
- Live Pair Programming, Open Source, and Building Communities with Nick Taylor [Software World Ep. #25]
Blogging
I haven't blogged a ton this year, but I still got some posts out, including one about automating my blogging workflow, which I'll discuss in the next section.
I also was one of the top authors for dev.to for 2022! The post I wrote about frontend developer resources was the number two post for the whole year! ๐คฏ
Automation of my content creation workflow
I put more time into automating some of the things I do in content creation. Regarding blogging, I blog on dev. A GitHub action runs nightly to pull in my dev.to posts into my blog. I got this set up just before starting at Netlify. Still, I recently improved it, so now it generates pull requests (PR) automatically with deploy previews. If all the checks pass, it merges automatically. Before that, I was merging the code directly to my main branch for my blog, so I could only see if something broke if I went to my Netlify dashboard. I'm really happy with this flow now.
Aside from that, I automated pulling in guest information for my Twitch stream. Before that, I was manually adding the info before every stream.
There have been some Tweaks, but here's the initial PR that made it happen.
feat: edge function now retrieves stream guest info
#3
Description
Adds a Netlify Edge function to retrieve a stream guest's info for the iamdeveloper.live stream.
- Use a Netlify Edge function to retrieve the guest's info from Airtable and then generate a redirect URL to e.g.
https://streamtastic.netlify.app/background.html?title=Some+Awesome+Title&guest=Some+Awesome+Guest - Caches the redirect for a couple of minutes since I may need to change the guest's info close to the stream time
- Use AirTable's REST API
- The path to the Edge function is
/stream-guest-info
Test
Navigate to https://deploy-preview-3--streamtastic.netlify.app/stream-guest-info. If there is no guest info for the day you are reviewing this PR the page will redirect to https://streamtastic.netlify.app/background.html.
Add some guest info for the day this is being reviewed, and as long as two minutes has passed since the guest info was added, you will see the following with some guest info
Issues & Related Documents
Closes #2
There's still more to do, but I'm really happy with this setup at the moment.
Community
VS Code Tips Community
I started a community over a year ago for VS Code, as I'm a fan. Ultimately, I needed more time to grow the community, which I didn't have, so I decided to shut down the community.
Thanks to everyone that joined!
My Discord Server
Although the VSCodeTips community didn't pan out in the end, I put my energy into a Discord community as it relates more to things I do weekly, like streaming. If you're interested in joining the community, head to discord.iamdeveloper.com.
Virtual Coffee
Although I've been a lot busier this year with the new job, I still volunteer at Virtual Coffee. It's my favourite community. As always, thanks to Bekah for starting this community, and to all the volunteers that make it happen.
The Collab Lab
I've been helping at The Collab Lab since December 2021, but it was mainly in Slack, supporting people. This summer, though, I got to mentor my first cohort. It was a lot of fun, and I'm super proud of what my team accomplished.
And that's a wrap! I'm looking forward to enjoying the rest of my vacation and coming back recharged for 2023!
Photo by Choong Deng Xiang on Unsplash
Other places you can find me at:
๐ฌ YouTube
๐ฌ Twitch
๐ฌ nickyt.live
๐ป GitHub
๐พ My Discord
๐ฆ Twitter/X
๐งต Threads
๐ My Podcast
๐๏ธ One Tip a Week Newsletter
๐ My Website
