My 2018 year in review

I started the year working on my personal website, polishing a few things in the back end and redesigning the front end after getting some feedback from friends. In March I published it, along with my first three articles. The idea was to publish articles mainly focused on Laravel as I was pretty focused on learning it.

To be honest, I thought I was going to be able to publish around 10 articles by the end of the year, but I finished with 13 and, although I started writing about Laravel, I ended up writing about APIs, Node.js, TDD.. even Machine Learning! Not bad.

In April I started learning Vue.js for a personal project which is still in progress and that hope I'll fully release this year. I've really enjoyed learning Vue as it's pretty easy to get something done and as it's the recommended front end framework for Laravel, it was pretty easy to include it in my existing projects. I'll try to improve my knowledge of Vue in the following months by learning Vuex and Vue Router. In addition the new version will be released this year, so I'll try to keep up to date with it.

I also started a Machine Learning course by Andrew Ng in Coursera which lead me to another algebra courses as I didn't have a proper background in maths to follow it. I wrote an article about it and also shared it in Medium. Then I started learning Node.js and wrote a few articles about that and started sharing them in Dev.to. I really like Dev as it has very good articles, the discussions are great and people always give awesome feedback in the comments. Since joining, I shared four of my articles, which have been read by more than 1500 people!

This year I also attended my first conference Laravel Live UK which had great talks. My favourites were the ones by Matt Stauffer and Rob Allen.

On a personal note, it has been a great year too. In August I applied to a role as a Node.js developer which I landed! The last months have been a non-stop learning experience and it has allowed me to learn a lot about Node best practises, testing, APIs and improve my knowledge of CI/CD tools like Jenkins and OpenShift.

Apart of all the things I've done and learnt, I've also been able to travel a lot: Sri Lanka, the Amalfi coast in Italy, New York, Greece, Canary Islands (twice), Menorca... and I already have a couple planned for the first half of 2019 :)

I've also kept running quite a lot, which was something I really wanted to do as it means I'm healthy and fit. I ran a 20km race and although I didn't improve my time from last year, it was pretty close. In total, I ran 66 days and more than 500Km. Oh! and I got Lasik surgery so I no longer need contacts!

Overall it's been a great year and I'm looking forward for the next one.

See you around 🤙