Nov 2019 Recap

[swyxio]

---

title: Nov 2019 Recap
slug: recap-nov-2019
category: essay
tags: ['Reflections']
date: 2019-12-03

Hello mailing list friends!

This month was a rough transition as I transitioned from speaking to learning and changed teams. I attended Chrome Dev Summit and Webflow's NoCodeConf (several people hit me up for takes, let me know if you have thoughts or questions) and then flew home to celebrate my little sister turning 21 :)

Speaking/writing schedule was accordingly light - I did share what I've done with the Svelte Site Generator at the Svelte Society NYC meetup, and did a recap of my Concurrent React from Scratch talk for a local React meetup. Probably the highlight of the month was being invited to do a podcast with Software Engineering Daily, one of my favorite podcasts, but it's not out yet.

I also gave a workshop on creating Node CLI's with Egghead.io, and have just got done rerecording them as individual guided lessons. The full recordings will be released in December! Something I definitely didn't expect would happen to me this year is becoming so interested and passionate about Node CLI's. I guess it came out of learning a ton about CLI tools and doing a bunch of thinking around CLI Developer Experience working on Netlify Dev this year.

Part of what gives me any confidence at all in what I'm doing is the encouragement from people I look up to like Jeff from SEDaily and Joel at Egghead, as well as other mentors who've taken time to help me even when I screw up badly. I often feel like I would do better if I spent less time with my head up my own ass and more time internalizing the advice I get and just doing that. If I fail even with this much help, there's really no excuse.

For December I'm interested in learning some Rails (Netlify's backend is partly Rails) and also trying out React-Native-Web for a small side project. I'd also like to write more, with a good deal more drafts and "paddling under the water" before the final output. My confidence took a huge crash this month and I need to shake it off and get back on the horse. I am exploring using Notion to do this, the personal plan looks really good for this.

That's it from me. All the best for your December and let me know if there's anything you'd like me to write about!