Here’s yet another post similar to ones from September 2018 and December 2017: a recap of things I’ve been busy with in stead of writing more blog posts. It includes several blog posts I’ve written (and possibly should’ve cross-posted here?) for my employer: Infi.
One special thing of note is my previous blog post from two years ago, about “Reproman”. I had much energy and a great plan for a grand new project. First, it somehow didn’t “click” for me… and then a pandemic hits. And also my job title changes at the same(ish) time. So that project didn’t go as planned. I can firmly declare it frozen (if not dead) at this point. There, I’ve said it.
With that out of the way, let’s dive into some things that did happen since that last post.
Blog posts
I have not blogged here, on my personal blog, for two years. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing some new content! Let’s start with blog posts I’ve written for my employer’s blog:
- ✨ Upcoming: a (Dutch) blogpost about The Infi Way, a project I’m personally also very proud of!
- July, August, and November 2021: an (English) series about “Slack Tips and Netiquette“: part 1 for beginners, part 2 for intermediate users, and part 3 for advanced users.
- October 2021: a (Dutch) post about our CSS Animations dojo a colleague organized at Infi.
- May 2021: a (Dutch) “wrap up” post about an event Infi organized together with Bikkelhart.
- October 2020: a (Dutch) post about team composition we (like to) have at Infi.
- ✨ June 2020: an (English) post about 3rd party cookies, OAuth2, OpenID, and SPA’s. I link quite a bit to this in my open source community contributions.
Emotionally, it feels right to “restart” the list with all the stuff from “before the pandemic started“:
- February 2020: a (Dutch) ‘version 2’ post about my schedule in a typical year working at Infi.
- January 2020: a (Dutch) ‘mob review’ of The Rise of Skywalker, which we went to see with 30 or so colleagues at the Dutch premiere.
- April and May 2019: a (Dutch) “wrap up” post about INFI-CON 2019 (a mini-conference I helped organize), and of course an “announcement” post about the event.
- March 2019: a (Dutch) ‘version 1’ post about my schedule in a typical year working at Infi.
- March 2019: a (Dutch) post about an experiment with Mob Programming.
So no shortage of inspiration for things to write about, as you can see! Just on a different blog, is all.
I will say I’m considering pushing myself to write more frequently here, on my personal blog. But we’ll see.
Projects
In addition to writing for Infi’s blog, I’ve also been busy on a few projects. As always, you can find the more interesting ones on jeroenheijmans.nl, but here’s a couple of highlights:
- JeroenHeijmans.nl (i.e. my homepage) got a refresher and updates with new content, just recently!
- Advent of Code has been an inspiration for all sorts of things. Notably, in 2021 I published a web version of “The Unofficial AoC Survey”, in addition to supporting my AoC Statistics Browser Extension.
- sample-angular-oauth2-oidc-with-auth-guards (yes, a mouthful) remains my most popular open source project, and I’ve been keeping it up to date since a few years now (in addition to vigilantly moderating the issues for said library).
That’s just a few highlights though, check my homepage for all different projects I’ve been running.
Various
Relevant to how many blog posts I can write, and how many projects I’m able to produce, is of course context. In software development, “it depends” is the standard state of things, right? It makes sense to share a few of the prime influences.
First up, since 2020, I’m not only a Technical Lead at Infi anymore. I’ve also signed up to be part of the management team as CTO of Infi Utrecht. I consider getting management responsibilities a demotion rather than a promotion, yet I feel compelled to spend part of my time making and keeping Infi a place I want to work at.
Second, of course, is the pandemic. In addition to having just about all possible privileges already, in the pandemic I also had no kids, had a great partner, and a relatively stable job. This makes (I presume) things a lot easier to handle. But still, it affected me regardless. I’ve mostly been acknowledging that, and acting accordingly. I hope you all can do so too!
Finally
In conclusion: what’s next!?
Well, I consider writing part of my job. So if you follow me on Twitter you’ll at least see my posts I wrote for Infi circulate. In addition I might write a bit more frequent here too. And if not, I’ll be sure to write another one of these “round up” blogposts in some months or years.
We’ll see.