</2014>
I love this part of the year, after all a new year is a new beginning, right?
It's now a tradition: every year I try to list the things I've done (2011, 2012, 2013), this is a reminder to identify what decisions worked well and what was a disaster. For me, it's also the time to ask myself: "Where do I wanna get in my career?" and after some thought into that comes the second question: "What am I doing right now to achieve that?"
2014 was the year when I officially made the shift towards a Developer Advocate career. I've been doing that for the past years but now it's official. Because of that, this year's selfish retrospective is going to be focused in the highlights and some numbers related to that.
Talks
A very important part of my job (and probably the one I most love to do) is to travel and talk to developers. I'm not gonna lie to you, standing in front of hundreds of people is still pretty scary but the feeling you get after a talk is so rewarding that you just can't stop doing it.
I've been trying more to measure the impact of everything I do. One important addition to the always-up-to-date list of presentations found at zenorocha.com/talks is the approximate number of attendees for each event. I'm also gathering social media feedbacks using Storify, that way all your lovely post-talk tweets will be saved for my future kids to see.
Highlights
Since 2014 was the Web Component year for me, I can only choose a talk about that same topic. Presented in San Francisco on April, 'Web Components: a chance to create the future' was the shortest but most impactul talk I gave this year both in quantitative and qualitative terms. A 14-minute video with almost 10 thousand views on YouTube so far.
Stats
One of my goals for this year was to explore more places. Although all these long hour flights demand a lot of energy, I feel extremely lucky to be able to experience so many cities with so many different people.
- 2012: 24 talks. 13 cities in 3 different countries.
- 2013: 18 talks and 3 workshops. 12 cities in 3 different countries.
- 2014: 21 talks and 4 workshops. 18 cities in 8 different countries.
For obvious reasons, I also wanted to give more talks in English rather than Portuguese and I'm happy to see this plan going pretty well too.
Blogposts
Along the years I started to write more in other blogs than in my own site. I like the idea of collaborating to higher audience channels and I'll keep doing that. My plan for 2015 is to use this site as a hub to the content I produce elsewhere.
Highlights
My favorite blogpost this year was written in Portuguese and is called "Ser popular é uma merda". It was something that I had to get off my chest about how being popular sucks, however even with all the exposure and bad judgment that people make about you it still worth it somehow.
Stats
I must admit, this year I spent more time consuming written content than actually producing it. Amazon and its goddamn Kindle are probably the main responsible for that, I just love buying and reading stuff there. Anyway, it's time to get back to writing, don't you think?
Podcasts
Since 2012, I've been hosting the Zone Of Front-Enders podcast along with Daniel Filho. It's been an amazing journey, really. I got to know some incredible people and we were able to bring a lot of good discussions to our audience.
As some of you may know, I took the decision to leave the podcast some weeks ago. It wasn't easy but some personal reasons led me to believe that it was the best thing to do.
When we first started, there were no podcasts about front-end development stuff in Brazil. Now, when I see projects like CodeTalks and Update Sem Where, I feel like my mission is finally accomplished.
Highlights
For me the best episode in 2014 was ZOFE #17 with Miller Medeiros and the reason why I choose this one is very simple: we recorded it in the very same room in São Paulo.
Still, nothing can be compared by the joy we had in the day before BrazilJS Conf. This little event in Porto Alegre to get together some ZOFE fans was one of the most special moments I had in my entire year.
Personal Contact: the richest experience, not matched by any media or technology
— Small Acts Manifesto
Stats
Truth be told, we didn't dedicate as much time as we wanted for it.
- 2012: 4 episodes
- 2013: 8 episodes
- 2014: 8 episodes and 2 interviews (The Web Platform Podcast and ClicheCast)
Even though I might disappoint some people by leaving the podcast, I'm excited to see what Almir Filho, Caio Gondim, and Rafael Rinaldi will come up for the new ZOFE 2.0.
Thank you so much for all of you wearing our t-shirts and showing our stickers in your computers everyday.
Projects
I'm really afraid of becoming those kind of people that only talks but don't do anything. That's why I try to keep my GitHub profile pretty active by contributing to many different projects.
One of the things I liked about last year was that I got more in contact with organizations that I'm a big fan of such as HTML5 Boilerplate and Yeoman. There's a lot to learn from every single person in those orgs.
Highlights
WebComponents.org, launched in May.
Tracking.JS, re-launched in July.
Senna, launched in August.
Some projects has been developed as a duo with Eduardo Lundgren, this is working really well and we hope to release even more exciting stuff in 2015. By the way, finding someone that you can count with and complement your skills makes the whole difference.
Stats
I know that GitHub stars doesn't mean anything but since open source projects are really hard to measure let's use this.
- WebComponents.org: 483 stars on GitHub
- Tracking.JS: 2,411 stars on GitHub
- Senna: 1,005 stars on GitHub
Videos
I'm not a big fan of video format for technology learning content because it gets outdated really quickly. Even so, I still do some tutorials and a couple of my talks are recorded as well. That's why I'm putting everything on a YouTube channel now in a much more organized way.
Highlights
One of the nice things about being a Google Developer Expert is that you have access to the whole company infrastructure, including a studio.
Because of that, we had this idea to create a video series about Chrome DevTools in Portuguese. This project was by far one of the things that consumed more energy in a short period of time. I had to create the whole content by myself in a week and we took a whole day to record it.
Stats
I don't always record screencasts but when I do I try to do as polished as possible. Here you can see the most popular ones:
- 2012: Sublime Text 2 - 36,050 views
- 2013: Bye Zen Coding, Hello Emmet! - 73,460 views
- 2014: Chrome DevTools - 41,786 views
What's next?
2014 was amazing and I'm sure 2015 will bring even more exciting stuff. Thank you for reading and being a part of all this.