Review: 2018

The blog has become silent, still I’d like to begin the year 2019 with a little retrospective, just like in 2017, 2016 and 2015.

Since there were no new posts in 2018 and I turned off the tracker, there are no new blog statistics this time, instead I’ll start with an overview where you find posts by me elsewhere.

For a while I publish more on the company blog of integer_net: https://www.integer-net.com/blog/

RSS feed https://www.integer-net.com/feed/ (the colleagues write interesting articles as well)

Blog Posts 2018

So here are my blog posts of the year, ordered by date, descending:

Reacticon v2 – Today We’ll Create A New Future (Nov 1)

Conference Speaking Checklist (Sep 21)

ExtDN Extension Quality Working Group & Community Hangout (Jun 5)

Test Smell: Copy and Paste (May 14)

View Models in Magento 1 and 2 (Apr 3)

Decorators for Magento Templates (Apr 3)

Magento API Tests and Continuous Integration (Mar 14)

Test Smell: Hard Coded Values (Mar 8)

DEITY – Technical Overview (Mar 5)

Test Smell: Irrelevant information (Mar 1)

Test Smell: Mystery Guest (Feb 16)

For the “Test Smell” series I have a few more articles in my backlog that I did not finish, this year it will continue.

Talks

Like in the years before, I attended several conferences in 2018. This time more often as attendee than as speaker, but I gave at least 2 talks:

Satisfying the Need for Mobile Speed: Building the Ultimate PWA experience, enterJS, Darmstadt, mit Jamie Maria Schouren

Together we presented Deity (https://www.deity.io/) and why the principle of Progressive Web Apps (PWA) is becoming more and more important, also in the eCommerce space. It was exciting to go to a JavaScript conference, kind of as a newbie who does not know anyone, something that I did not experience elsewhere for years. The community is super nice and enterJS a professionally and pleasantly organized conference, I recommend it! The talk will still be published on https://www.enterjs.de/videos.php.

Dealing with Testing Fatigue Meet Magento PL, Krakow

This one I held originally at MageTestFest 2017, improved it over time, presented at a few user groups, and shortened it to 30 minutes for the Meet Magento. This time there’s a video recording as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lZLc8IDhes

Achievements

What did I achieve in 2018?

Selected as “Magento Master”, one of 20 worldwide, for the second time in a row. This time I went to Las Vegas to receive the award in person at the Imagine conference
Certified as Magento 2 Solution Specialist and Magento 2 Professional Developer
Partnered up with Deity (as integer_net) to become early adopter of ecommerce PWA
Started with React.js and modern JavaScript development. A new world, after I missed about 5 years
Wrote a few more pages of my book. Yeah, that’s a non-achievement, 2019 should change that 🙂 Stay up to date: https://tddwizard.com/
Entered the ExtDN working group for Magento extension quality, with the project to develop a community-driven PHP_CodeSniffer standard, as addition to the various official standards. After a few months of silence, there are already new plans for 2019, published soon: https://github.com/extdn/extdn-phpcs/

Resolutions?

Since the yearly review did not happen last year, I have nothing to verify 🙂

For this blog I am not going to plan anything for 2019, except maybe to link posts in the integer_net blog immediately. But still, I’d like to blog more again, so:

Write more than 1 blog post per month at integer-net.com

I can imagine to reactivate this blog though, for things like my “5-Minute Tips” link collections.

At work I am looking forward to interesting new projects this year, some already begun. Meanwhile I want to prevent to be swallowed by project work and take more time for:

Internal tooling and processes
Open Source, ExtDN
Reading. At the end of the year I want to look back to 4 technical and 8 non-technical books at the very least
Writing

This year for real: