I’m going to keep this year in review short because it was a crappy year and I didn’t do much. Still, I’d like to mark a few noteworthy events. This is mostly for me to have closure with this year.
Timeline
🤯 February 24th. I worked on a fun little project called Selectors Explained. It’s a teeny-tiny site explaining a CSS selector in plain English.
🐈 April 17th. One of my cats passed away after several health complications. He’s been with me for almost 10 years, and it’s been difficult saying goodbye. Being always at home and missing his presence did not make things any easier.
🐱 October. I started using “Kitty” instead of my legal first name as a semi-official name, starting with many online services. I also bought kittygiraudel.com.
🌱 November 15th. This day marked 2 years for me without eating meat and one year without fish.
💻 November 23rd. After having my MacBook Pro since early 2014, I decided it was time to buy a new one. It’s not much, but it was quite a big decision to buy a new laptop, so it’s something!
👋 November 27th. My last day at N26, after over 4 years as the lead web engineer. It’s been bittersweet leaving the team, but I’m excited to join Gorillas in January.
⚙️ November 30th. I moved my site from Jekyll to 11ty, after over 8 years running on Jekyll. Very happy with my decision though!
📆 December. I participated in and finished the Advent of Code, for the first time. It was a lot of fun but was only doable because I didn’t work in December. I also ran my own advent calendar about accessibility.
🌟 December 12th. I got the opportunity to write for CSS-Tricks once more, this time against gatekeeping. This is humbling because in many ways Chris Coyier is the person who put me on the map, so to say, by letting me write on CSS-Tricks at the beginning of my career and being an early CodePen adopter.
A bit of open-source
Whether it is because I was less busy at work or had time off in December, it turns out I have done some contributions to open-source in 2020. Namely:
- I published react-a11y-dialog v5.0.0, a redesign of the API to provide hooks.
- I created react-a11y-footnotes, a React component to automate accessible footnotes.
- I created eleventy-plugin-footnotes, an 11ty plugin to automate accessible footnotes.
For next year
Heh. I’m not sure there is much point setting up goals since I don’t give myself the drive to pursue them. One thing though: my partner gave me a kit to make cheese, and I intend to use it. 🧀
Also, I hope I can keep writing as much as I did in 2020. After basically no output in 2019 (3 articles total), I wrote 32 articles across 2020—one of them being the #A11yAdvent calendar which eventually got split into 24 smaller entries because it was too big. Let 2021 continue on that track.