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2018 Goals Review

Random

I’ve put off writing this for a while, I would say this is about the fifth attempt. I had a lot happen in my life last year, and writing a post like this makes it seem like it was just another year, when it really wasn’t. When you put goals like this up against losing someone you love or adding of your family, they seem really insignificant.

Acknowledging that, yearly goals and their corresponding update are a tradition I wish to keep up with, so I think this year I will just keep it short and sweet.

Finish one woodworking project a week

I didn’t finish 52 projects but I did make a dresser and maybe 25 other things, mostly on my new lathe. I would say about 10 to 12 of which were worth keeping, I was even able to use a few as Christmas presents.

  • Little Snowman
  • Maple Change Bowl
  • Spalted Maple Bowl
  • Walnut Platter

Brew 6 times

I made two batches this year, but both turned out well. I made an English Mild and a Dunkelweissen. I used a kit for the English Mild and made the recipe for the Dunkel. I’d link to the recipies, but this site I used to store all my brewing info shut down, I’m still looking for a replacement.

  • English Mild
  • Dunkelweissen

5 Web Projects

In the past year, I made:

Eat out less

This went well. It took a little to get consistent. For the second half of the year though, I would say I ate out once a month at the most.

Write/Post three things a month

I started up at teageek.blog again this year like I wanted and between there and here have 24 posts total.

Solidify a morning routine

Well, they can’t all be winners right? Didn’t really make any progress on this at all.

I’m famous!

Code

Well, maybe that’s a stretch, but I was listed as one of the contributors to WordPress 5.0 in the official release post. It has been really fun to be able to contribute to Gutenberg lately. Even though I only made one or two small contributions, it’s exciting thinking about the sheer number of people who will be using the code I wrote. It’s also fun to think about the fact that 450+ other people worked together to make it happen. Most of them probably just like me, contributing purely because they are able to.

Hopefully, I can keep setting aside some time to work on it. Both because it’s fun and because it’s really helped me learn a lot. I think one thing that people don’t talk about enough when discussing open source is how much it helps you grow as a developer. I’ve learned a lot of things I wouldn’t have in my normal day-to-day work, most of which has helped me get better at my real job.

A Quick Trip to Toronto

Random

I just got back from a few days in Toronto that I spent attending some web conferences. I had a great time, so I thought I’d share my thoughts.

Full Stack Toronto

Full Stack Toronto was the conference I had traveled in for and it was a reallty good conference. Especially if you work for a non-profit since they have a discount which made the conference ticket around $75.  I would say if you are close and can make it it is worth your time, even at full price. Specifically, Jenn Creighton’s talk on flexible React components, Joe Carlsson on React performance and Rachael McQuater’s talk on TypeScript (Yay Grand Rapids!) were really good.  There also was clearly a big push for diversity in speakers by the organizers which I really appreciated.

WordCamp Toronto

I’de never been to a WordCamp before, but have recently been spending some more time with WordPress and the new Gutenberg editor. I knew that the 5.0 release would be a few days before this WordCamp when I registered for it, so I thought it would be interesting to time to check it out. (It ended up being a few days later – today!)  This was interesting in that it was not at all who I thought would be attending. I guess I expected a group similar to who I had been at Full Stack Toronto – full-time developers, already up to speed on everything WordPress. If I had to guess that would only be about 50-70% of everyone there, with a lot more casual WordPress end users – people who use it to make websites but develop heavily. It was an interesting perspective and I am glad that I went. I knew there was some concern about page builders and Gutenberg, but even then I was surprised by the number of times it came up. 

The City

Even though I live only a few hours away, I’ve never been to Toronto before. To be honest, I knew it was a big city, but I didn’t know it was as big as it is (4th largest in North America!)  For its size it was super clean, something I really appreciate. I stayed right downtown in a super nice condo through Airbnb. It was super nice but the owner must not have been permitted to rent it out because the check-in instructions were “Walk right past security, if they stop you, tell them you are here visiting Susan” Besides that, super nice, even had a gym I could use. The Chinatown area was my favorite part, great food, tea, and fun to walk around. the Chinatown seemed more authentic, with less of the super-touristy stuff like in New York or San Francisco. The art museum was cool and free every Wednesday night. The other thing I did was head to St. Lawrence Market for a Toronto specialty – the “Pea-meal bacon sandwich.” I thought it was odd they called it bacon since it was more like ham to me, then had the embarrassing realization of why we sometimes call ham “Canadian Bacon.” 

Gray Harmonizer

Code

https://brentswisher.github.io/gray-harmonizer/

I just finished up creating a little tool to help with a design task I find tedious. Being more of a developer than a designer, choosing color schemes can be a little challenging sometimes. One technique I’ve found really helpful is “harmonizing the grays”. Basically, once you have your colors, you filter the gray values with your primary or secondary color so they are “tinted” slightly. I’m not sure if she created it, but I first heard about it from Erica Schoonmaker.

What’s not great, is having to use Photoshop or some other design software to do it. So I made it a website! It was a perfect use case for React, and the test suite in create-react-app made it easy to make sure my color conversions were correct.

Restoring a vintage hand plane

Woodworking

A few months ago I picked up a hand plane at an antique shop we had stopped at on our vacation. I had been keeping an eye out for one since I was looking to get into woodworking a little more. Supposedly, old planes are just as good as new ones once they get restored, and the restoration process seemed simple enough. Long story short, it went really well, and I get why people are obsessed with these things.

The coolest part, is I posted online asking if anyone could identify it. Since it didn’t have any branding on it I couldn’t tell and was curious how old it was. Thankfully, the internet can be a neat place and someone was able to tell me they were pretty sure it was most likely make somewhere between 1902-07. Crazy right?

Maybe it’s because most of the things I make day to day are websites the get stale after a year or two and become useless after about five, but it’s really interesting to think that I am using something someone made over 100 years ago.