2019: My year in a blog post

I’m writing this blog post as a reflection of the past year, as I think that myself and many others don’t spend enough time looking back at our achievements. In this profession, it can feel like a constant uphill battle and you can be left feeling like you haven’t made any progress, until you take a second to look back even just a month ago and realise how much you’ve progressed.

This year, I can say without a shadow of a doubt is the hardest I’ve worked in my whole life. Saying that, it doesn’t feel like it’s been hard work. I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. It’s also been one of the most rewarding years of my life. I’ve finally found my thing. My passion.

At the start of the year, I was still picking up HTML, CSS and basic Javascript. I had also started work on two projects:

Greg Woodin

Created my first live site, an academic portfolio for a friend of mine: www.gregwoodin.co.uk. (Feb)

Ionic Builds

A wordpress site for a friend’s local construction business: www.ionicbuilds.co.uk. (March)

First job offer

In February, I also received and accepted an offer to work as a web application developer for MHR in Nottingham, starting in July. This would be my first step into the working world of the tech industry, and I would be working on People First, an enterprise HR social network web application. (March)

My own portfolio and blog

The website you’re on now! I put a heap of time into designing and implementing this website, and it ended up being an ongoing project for me for many months: www.danielcornock-legacy.netlify.app. (April - August)

Starting my first job

I started my job in July, and I’m amazed at how much I’ve learned in only 6 months of being there. I started learning Angular and TypeScript just before starting, and they’ve grown to be some of my favourite tools to use in my projects. (July)

Diving in to the back-end

On multiple occasions, I’d tried to dive in to learning back-end technologies but was never able to get it to stick. That is, until I tried Jonas Schmedtmann’s course on Udemy, and got stuck in to building APIs! (August)

PropertyRight

PropertyRight was my first crack at a full stack web application, and I learned a lot of things on the way. I used Angular and NodeJS (with express), later going on to move the whole of the API to use object-oriented TypeScript. (September - November)

The era of unit testing

When I started my job and had to write unit tests for my first component, I was absolutely in the dark. I had never written a unit test in my life, and I needed to have my hand held the entire way. Since then, I’ve grown a lot more confident in testing and have even started testing my own applications. Look, 100% coverage! (November - December)

What I’m up to now

Currently, I’m working on a new open-source project: a Kanban board written with Angular on the front-end and NestJS on the back-end (both using TypeScript). I’ve just finished my first big feature story that I was solely responsible for at work, and I’m gradually progressing on to bigger projects.

Since building my own applications, I’ve started taking more of an interest in design patterns and good practises. I’ve also realised how great TypeScript is to use in both the front-end and the back-end (and wherever you would use JavaScript, really), and I’m always trying to find ways to abstract code and make it as human-readable as possible.

I’m also working on another freelance project, an academic portfolio which I hope to complete by January.

Wrapping it all up

It’s been an amazing year for me, and I have to say I’m proud of myself. I’ve found something that I love to do, whilst also getting paid to do it.

I look forward to 2020, and what challenges and achievements await me.

Have a great start to the new year everybody!