From getting answers for pain I'd struggled with all my life to starting a new job in November - my 2023 has been a bit of a roller coaster.
Proud Moments
January/February
This time last year I had just started down the path to an EDS diagnosis. It took me about six months to get diagnosed while simultaneously starting treatment. Six months is a very fast diagnosis and I have a brilliant care team to thank. However, treatment involved an overwhelming number of doctors appointments and daily full-body physical therapy. Just getting a handle on the logistics of all that was a success.
March
Like We've Been Here Since the Beginning in 2022, I was honored by the reception of 8 Ways to Support Women Developers. I was very proud of myself for channeling my frustration at ongoing harassment into something positive.
April
I celebrated hitting 4,000 followers on DEV. Little did I know, I'd be approaching 9,000 in December.
May
I gave my first in-person tech talk at a Modern Web Meetup. I've given the talk a few more times since then, and it's become the first talk I'm comfortable giving. Most importantly to me, it's given confidence to people struggling with making their perfectly functional apps look ok.
I surpassed 200,000 total post views on DEV.
I finally made some progress on my digital garden at abbeyperini.com.
June
I attended RenderATL. I had a blast with friends old and new. I even brought out my Bombshell Batwoman costume. The moment I stepped out of the Uber and no one else in line was in costume was nerve-wracking. Reintroducing myself to everyone I had met while wearing a wig also took confidence!
July
I surpassed 10,000 post views on Hashnode!
A number of people reached out to tell me that my Coding and ADHD series from 2022 had changed their lives. For some, this meant getting an official diagnosis. I am always overjoyed when I find out my writing had real-life positive impact.
August/September
After some well-earned rest and relaxation, I continued working on my digital garden. As part of making images for the site, I made stickers! You can purchase them in my Printify store.
October
I visited Mississippi for the first time and gave my first tech conference talk at MagnoliaJS. We discovered Spindrift-based motivation really works on me. Then, my friends got me to give a talk at Connect.Tech the next week. The second one really helped with my public speaking anxiety.
I won the day one MagnoliaJS costume contest with a Barbie costume I sewed and crocheted.
With the same costume, I also won the DEV costume contest!
November
I started a new job! So far, it's been a great fit. I've now worked in Angular, React, and Vue - the JS Framework hat trick. Let's not talk about how it was AngularJS 2013, the original.
December
I was delighted to find out my articles had been featured the most times in the weekly Top 7 in 2023!
Brilliant Fails
I started an American Sign Language class in January and promptly overwhelmed myself with notecards and the aforementioned doctors appointments. I start the same class for a second time next week.
I didn't make as much progress on my digital garden as I would like. A lot of times this year, it felt like I was barely keeping my head above water. It took reassessing what I find fun about coding to get the progress that I did. I still feel it has a long way to go, but using HTML custom components instead of a framework has surprisingly been relevant to work I get paid for.
Starting a new job in November with all the American holidays has been overwhelming. Luckily, I was able to embrace taking it one day at a time and my new boss has been holding me accountable for taking breaks.
One of my goals for 2023 was to be more consistent with content creation. Including this one, I succeeded at writing one blog per month this year!
Future Goals
Write some blogs about learning Vue.
Finally finish that digital garden dark mode toggle.
Deploy the new version of Knitworthy that doesn't use the Ravelry API.
Get the design for a chronic illness symptom tracking app out of my head and written down.
Figure out an image compression solution for the digital garden. Netlify deprecated theirs and I want to add a page with lots of photos from conferences.