2018 in review

2018 in review

Slightly late on my yearly roundup, which was the catchphrase of the year for me. I’m not quite sure where 2018 went, to be honest, I had so many plans, then it was halfway through the year, then it was over. One of my resolutions for 2019 is to make sure I have more time for personal and creative projects. Which I think I also said last year 😭.

All in all, it was a good year, and I worked for a lot of interesting projects, which explains the lack of time. I travelled a little too much, but visited interesting places, and met interesting people. I was disappointed in myself for not finishing some of my creative projects, and am doubling down to complete a few more in 2019.

As part of this plan, I am rebranding and rejigging what I do. This includes:

  • [Switching my Gregarious Mammal presence to be a pure tech writing agency, and no longer use it as my creative vehicle.]{#a168}
  • [My Chris Chinchilla presence will be reborn as my hub for creative projects, talks, blogs with my name on, and podcasts.]{#d89f}

Speaking of podcasts, I am shuttering the Gregarious Mammal podcast and splitting into some new shows:

  • [Bringing back the weekly squeak news show that will tie tightly with my weekly newsletter.]{#87be}
  • [Starting two new shows, one called “The Enthusiastic Amateur”, one based on “The Boardgame Jerk” bot I have.]{#9b98}
  • [The Write the Docs show will continue and I may merge some of the interviews into a DZone podcast.]{#b70f}

My newsletter will assume it’s regular weekly schedule inline with the podcast, and I am also launching two new automated newsletters:

  • [One covering Tech Ethics with Nicholas Borsotto.]{#240b}
  • [One covering “language”, NLP, voice interfaces, interactive fiction and more.]{#8add}

My planned creative projects are:

  • [A book on improving tech.]{#b902}
  • [Expanding the Boardgame Jerk bot.]{#3878}
  • [A Geek vs. Geek card game.]{#319f}
  • [An anonymous blog. I can’t tell you what it is, as that would spoil things 😁.]{#27a0}
  • [One shot RPG scenarios based on my “One Day the World Ended” project.]{#46dc}
  • [Finishing the “One Day the World Ended” card game, that will tie into the RPG.]{#aa57}
  • [A bunch of other interactive fiction wotsits.]{#8ee9}

Oh, and a whole set of open source contributions of course.

But what happened in 2018 🤔?

Writing {#faf8 .graf .graf—h3 .graf-after—p name=“faf8”}

In 2018, I wrote approximately 74 articles, blog posts, and tutorials. In addition to this I contributed documentation to IPFS, Solidity, Plasma MVP, Vale, Event Store, Facebook Messenger, and probably a bunch more I’ve forgotten.

The most popular on my Medium account were:

Most popular on DZone were:

Video and audio {#95dc .graf .graf—h3 .graf-after—li name=“95dc”}

I created 62 podcast episodes, and the most popular were:

Proving that Blockchain people love podcasts!

I created a video course for Manning called “CSS in Depth{.markup—anchor .markup—p-anchor data-href=“https://livevideo.manning.com/course/25/css-in-depth-in-motion” rel=“noopener” target=“_blank”}”, which took a lot of work!

Presentations and Conferences {#e4fc .graf .graf—h3 .graf-after—p name=“e4fc”}

I spoke at, or reported on approximately 40 conferences and meetups, not including the roughly 2 a week I attend in Berlin on a regular basis.

According to Google (including personal travel) this included 26 airports, 267 places, 50 cities and 17 countries. Just over 100,000km.

That was a little too many, and in 2019 I am going to be more focused on which events I attend.