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.
• My Chris Chinchilla presence will be reborn as my hub for creative projects, talks, blogs with my name on, and podcasts.

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.
• Starting two new shows, one called “The Enthusiastic Amateur”, one based on “The Boardgame Jerk” bot I have.
• The Write the Docs show will continue and I may merge some of the interviews into a DZone podcast.

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.
• One covering “language”, NLP, voice interfaces, interactive fiction and more.

My planned creative projects are:

• A book on improving tech.
• Expanding the Boardgame Jerk bot.
• A Geek vs. Geek card game.
• An anonymous blog. I can’t tell you what it is, as that would spoil things 😁.
• One shot RPG scenarios based on my “One Day the World Ended” project.
• Finishing the “One Day the World Ended” card game, that will tie into the RPG.
• A bunch of other interactive fiction wotsits.

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

But what happened in 2018 🤔?

Writing

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:

• Tutorial: Using the Messenger Webview to create richer bot-to-user interactions
• Making Atom (even more) awesome — My Setup
• A documentation crash course for developers

Most popular on DZone were:

• What Apple’s September Announcements Might Mean for Developers
• Why Programmers Should Play Boardgames
• Will Linux (Finally) Win the Desktop War Because No One Else Cares?s

Video and audio

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

• Stefan Thomas, ripple and Malta blockchain summit
• Creative Industries on the Blockchain — Zach LeBeau of SingularDTV
• Ben Goertzel of SingularityNET and Hanson Robotics

Proving that Blockchain people love podcasts!

I created a video course for Manning called “CSS in Depth”, which took a lot of work!

Presentations and Conferences

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.