Yep, this is my retrospective post for 2014. But first, let’s revisit my thoughts on 2013:

Fuck 2013.

— Will Boyd (@lonekorean) January 1, 2014

Yeah, 2013 was a rough year. 2014 was better.

Career Stuff

I left Amazon to work for POP. Very different atmosphere. I went from working on a single project at a huge corporation, to working on several projects at a smaller design agency. I’ve enjoyed the change. It’s given me more opportunities to pick up new skills. I still do a hefty amount of client-side programming, but now I have some good experience with pre-processors, task runners, and various JavaScript frameworks.

Writing Stuff

It’s been a good year for writing. Here are my top 3 blog posts of 2014 (by views):

  1. Fun Times with CSS Counters — My most popular article of 2014. It was fun coming up with demos that appeared to require JavaScript, but didn’t. Featured on CSS Weekly and Sidebar, tweeted by Smashing Magazine, and posted on CSS Tricks. Also translated to Russian and Chinese.
  2. Gradient Animation Trick — I actually published this at the end of 2013, but it didn’t get noticed until 2014. Surprised me a bit, since it was just a quickie blog post I made one Sunday afternoon. Also featured on CSS Weekly and Sidebar and tweeted by Smashing Magazine.
  3. Creating Glow Effects with CSS — The demos were fun to make, since they let me play around with pretty colors. For whatever reason, this article has really good SEO. Not complaining.

I also had my first paid gig as a freelance writer with the Effective Event Binding with jQuery article I wrote for SitePoint. Writing for them was a good experience. Would do again.

Looking Forward

I have high hopes for 2015. Lots of personal goals, but I’ll mention the professional ones here.

Becoming a better web developer still stands, as always. In particular, I want to push my JavaScript skills to the next level, to not just write good code, but to architect good solutions.

I’m also striving to play a bigger role in the web development community. I’ll continue to write articles, craft demos, and hopefully do more with open source, but I think the next big step will be public speaking.

Thanks for reading. See you in 2015!