2015: in review

It is said that change is the only constant and that certainly proved true this year around here in 2015. I started the year working as a Front End Stack team (core team) member for the LDS Church and finished it as a Senior Front End Engineer for Instructure. During that time I re-wrote designfrontier on a new engine, using ansble for it’s data store and gave it an isomorphic facelift on monument.

I also wrote ansble and monument! I had hoped to have ansble ready for a full scale public roll out by the end of the year but that didn’t happen. I should have it done this quarter (fingers crossed). For the curious it is a REST APIed data store with both a hosted and self-hosted option.

monument has taken off averaging around 1000 downloads per month, putting it in the top 10% of npm. It’s been fun to develop and more fun to talk about with people. I’ve learned a lot doing it. If you are about to build a new node project you should definitely take a look at it. It’s fast, simple, has great boilerplate tooling, and works really well.

Other Open Source projects I created this year included Event State which is something like Promise.all for events. Harken a lightweight node EventEmitter compatible event system with some nice sugar on top. Node Cached a really simple in memory cache for node. bernstein a tool for executing an arbitrary series of functions and passing the results through them. Works with both callbacks and promises. Jayne a middleware system for browsers. I also contributed to several other open source projects and should have my first contribution to nodejs merged soon. It was a good year for open source around here!

I also spoke at Utah JS Conf on arrays, doing a deep dive on all the parts available. There is a site and a < a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i29U4m1XMCQ>recording of that presentation if you want to watch it. Suffice it to say arrays are awesome and they should be the core of how you program js.

Changing jobs to Instructure has been fantastic. I love working there and am working with some of the smartest people I have ever met.

On a more personal note I became a father to a beautiful perfect daughter this year. Which is the greatest blessing ever! She is amazing and so is her mother. Couldn’t ask for more.

2016 looks like it is going to be pretty exciting! With a lot more writing around here :-)

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