2023 Wrap Up
Like always, I wanted to take a moment at the end of the year to reflect on this blog, my professional growth, and just generally what I've been up to. This is mostly for me, so I'll keep this short and sweet.
Blog Posts and Series
The first blog series I got into this year was an exploration of Sonic Pi, a fun little program that lets you write Ruby and produce music:
This culminated in a lengthy piece called Cloister that I released on my Bandcamp:
The other series I have been working through is about React. I've been slowly making my way through Josh W. Comeau's Joy of React course. I've learned a lot from him but wanted to take some time with the concepts to do some further exploration, hence a lot of blog posts about React topics:
- React: Basics
- React: Structure, Components, and Fragments
- React: Iteration
- React: Conditional Rendering
- React: Styling
- React: Props
- React: Event Handlers
- React: State
One of my resolutions in 2024 is to finish this course, so you can definitely expect more on this topic.
Otherwise these two series were bookended by a lot of random posts. I wrote about Symlinks, did a review on a Udemy course that it took me several years to get through, picked apart the Bake Mode feature on the King Arthur website, and wrote a unit test that runs in AWS Amplify. Thrilling.
Professional Development
Let's take a moment to track some professional growth. In April I designed and led a team culture onsite workshop for my engineering team at Sprout. We spent a morning examining team norms and held space for open and candid talks about what was working and what wasn't. It was an amazing, nerve-racking experience, but the team walked away feeling super close and ready to take on the world.
That comradery was super necessary because a month or two later, we started the process of a complete website redesign. We are tackling years of technical debt and moving to a new, modern stack. It's a messy process, but the first set of pages is out and we're working through the rest.
All of this work coincides with a title change, too. I am now the Team Lead Senior Web Engineer of the Marketing Development team at Sprout Social. This transition means many wonderful things, but in short it means I am taking technical ownership of our system and am charged with defining and delivering quality in our system and team.
Travel
I didn't get to travel as much this year as I did in 2023, but I was fortunate enough to be able to step away from Austin several times:
I went to Chicago for work in early April/May:
In July we escaped the heat of the summer and went to Mexico City. I'm particularly proud of this trip; I prepped for several months on Duolingo and watched a ton of telenovelas to get my Spanish chops up a little bit. I stumbled a lot but was ultimately able to navigate several days in Mexico!
Went back to Chicago in August for Sprout Social's Midyear Meetup:
In November we went on down to the Big Easy for a long weekend:
And lastly, down to Florida for the holidays:
Music
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention all of the music I got to make this year. I played a (for me) all time high number of 29 shows! Many with Thor & Friends, but also several with Little Mazarn, Future Museums, and solo. Also alongside David Slowing for his album release show. I got to play the Mohawk outside stage, an Austin bucket list stage for me. I also released that Cloister piece linked above.
You can track my music stuff over at https://joeyreyes.rocks. Oddly enough, I recently (like, sprinted to do so over the last week) redesigned this website's technical stack. It used to be a Gatsby site hosted on Netlify, but now it's a Next.js site with a Contentful backend hosted on AWS Amplify, using Bun for the local runtime. Hmmmmmmmmm.
Looking Forward to 2024
What a fantastic year of growth and art, and I want to continue the momentum in 2024. I have some recording scheduled for several projects, so there will definitely be more on the music front of things. I want to finish the Josh W. Comeau Joy of React course, and I will most likely redesign this website. A lot of good stuff is in the works, but I'm particularly proud that this blog is still going and that you're here reading it.
Happy coding and happy 2024,
Joey