Another year nears completion, so thus it's time for another end of the year in review posts. Let's see what I got up to this year.

Personally

I'm in a completely different spot writing this post than I was in last year. When I read last year's post it's clear I was hurting writing that post, struggling with my depression and in general it wasn't a great time for me. This year I finally got things worked out and I've been stable for the last ~10ish months. Thankfully.

There's always a risk that tomorrow I'll wake up and my mood will have sunk to the lows, or the highs of the past. I totally understand that medication may not be right for everyone, but ultimately it was the right call for me, getting on the right medicine for me has changed my life. Am I scared that I'm dependent on it for life? Maybe a little, but the alternative wasn't really an alternative that was acceptable for me.

I still live in Colorado, and I love it here, but at the same time I live an isolated life. Isolated from most of my friends, who live across the country, isolated from most family.

I'm finally stepping my toes in the world of dating/relationships, it just seems like a good time to do it now, when I'm finally mentally well and ready to give 100% of my effort to make a relationship work. We'll see where things end up, but right now things are new and exciting.

Professionally

I still work at Podia, and things are very good there. I got to work on a number of long-term projects and short-term projects that shipped successfully this year. One of the biggest things I was fortunate to work on was Podia's new rich text editor, there was a few members of the team who also worked hard on this and helped get things shipped but it was a major growth opportunity for me to stretch my legs and work in React.

It took us around a year and two months working through many different projects to:

research solutions to replace Trix/determine we were building our own based on ProseMirror/Tiptap
build a custom text editor that was robust for our users to have a wonderful text editing experience
build a backend storage system that would store the output from the text editor and render the content in web browsers and email clients.
replace all previous instances of Trix with our new text editor, building things into our text editor as required for each new place we replaced Trix

I'll be going into my 5th year at Podia in April, and can easily see myself here for many more years to come. It's the longest I've ever worked anywhere and honestly it's really great to have the stability I have.

Outside of work I was able to work on the following things;

Continue learning iOS/macOS app development
Continue writing for my Ruby for Beginners book
Worked on a Learn Rails by Building Instagram course, that hasn't seen the light of day even though I started recording episodes.
Began working on a new Hotwire course that I'm hoping can launch early 2024 depending on when Turbo 8 ships.
Built a second rich text editor using Tiptap and ProseMirror, called RicherText.js, it's nearly ready for prime time, in fact I'm using the first 1.0 beta version to write this post on my blog. Here's the website for that. I built this outside of work, not using any code from work, and used it to further my learnings of React which I then took back to work.

Next Year

I'll continue to prioritize my mental health over all other things, doing what's best for me, while working on side projects and my day job at Podia 😄.

I hope you have a good end of year and I can't wait to see what 2024 has in store. Thanks for reading~