2014–2015

This New Year came to me totally unexpected, can’t say that time was going too fast for me recently, more like the opposite. My last 2–3 years were full of events, exciting projects and lots of new people who brought me tons of experience.

Few intensive years passed as a whole new life and to keep myself organized, I’ve decided to set another annual checkpoint.

This post is more like a letter to myself, but I hope it could also become a small source of inspiration to people who are following my activities across the community.

Moving to international community

The biggest thing for me this year is the move from Riga to Amsterdam, and switching job from Russian speaking company to international one. Since last year, I’ve already started to translate my projects into English and from now on, I am moving to international community completely.

My main @operatino twitter account is now English only,
as well as new blog on medium.

I really like how Russian speaking community is evolving now, but it’s still too much distanced from the rest of the world. I hope that I will be able to bring those two worlds closer and cross-share some trends among both communities.

Most likely, I will not post anything new to my previous Russian blog ToHTML.it, and will use @operatino_ru only for responses and retweets. But I won’t miss a chance to meet my Russian colleagues for discussing latest trends and ideas.

Public talks

Recently I have set up a small summary page listing of my talks and projects, but since we’re talking about 2014, here are the latest ones:

• Erasing Borders Between Web Dev and Design — lightning talk from Fronteers Jam Session about synergy on two worlds, on the road for making modern websites
• Taking Development Tools To The Next Level — in this talk I have covered one of my beloved topics about Style Guides driven development, and how it will change the way we create new UI’s

• Front-end automation tools (RU) — my main topic of the year, as well as one of biggest community trends; besides the talks I have also did
  two full-day workshops in Kiev and Saint Petersburg about automation tooling

Last year I started experimenting with talk formats, moving away from regular 30 min talks towards full day workshops, and next year I am planning to focus more on my English presentations. I also will try to prepare fewer talks, but followed by deeper research.

Blog

Most of my posts in ToHTML.it blog during 2014 were announcements and published videos, as I tried to focus more on practice than theory.

Videos:

• SourceJS live presentation (RU with EN subtitles) — my first live hangouts stream, where I have covered SourceJS workflow, and Living Style Guide driven development setup
• Full web page HTML markup process — as some guys from community requested, I screencasted full markup process of small PSD file. This screecast got a lot of views, glad most of you have liked it!
• Full Grunt automation process demo — video recording of live Grunt automation process development
• Web components library based prototyping — demo of our SourceJS side project from company hackathon

And most important RU blog posts:

• Быстрая настройка и простая поддержка NodeJS приложения — Node.js project setup cookbook
• Автоматизация фронтенда — от простого к сложному — small write up about getting started with front-end automation

In 2015 I’m switching to a deeper format of articles and public talks, preparing more professional content for larger conferences and web publishers.

Apart from more serious and in-depth blog posts for Smashing magazine and other important resources, I will try to do more light posts in this Medium blog and short talks for local meetups.

Projects

SourceJS

SourceJS — Living Style Guide on Steroids, is my primary project for next few years, especially on the rise of component based development, which can’t live without proper management and testing environment.

In 2014 we’ve done a great job with guys from OK.ru, and almost pushed it to the stable version, adding lots of new improvements, plugins and stabilizing the architecture. More about this in separate posts.

In 2015 we will release 1.0.0 version, and focus more on the coverage of use cases coverage, working with the community and stability instead of new features.

DevShelf

DevShelf is a community driven articles hub, with goal to collect best suggestions and material compilations from real developers.

During the summer, we released important, stable version of the project, and got serious feedback from the community. Unfortunately, during second half of the year I was too busy to improve DevShelf with new features, but we have big plans for it next year.

Summing up

In 2014 I have got great experience with organizing workshops, playing with new presentation formats, stabilizing my current projects and focusing more on specific topics. Most important — I started a new chapter of my life and am very excited about upcoming challenges.

Here’s the list of promises to myself for 2015:

• Do more deep talks and extended, professional articles
• Focus more on existing projects, especially on SourceJS
• Meet lots of new people in international community
• Cover Living Style Guide driven development topic with cookbooks, screencasts and deep write-ups
• Have more hands on practice with client-side JS frameworks

In the end, I want to thank all of you for support and sharing efforts. Special thanks to my beloved partner for huge support and her love.

If I didn’t had access to such a great community and people that I have worked with, it wouldn’t be possible to reach even a small bit of what I have today. Thank you!

Work hard on what is important for you.
Always focus on self-development, this is the only right way
for reaching happiness and inner harmony.