2013 has come and gone, and it was an eventful year for me both professionally and personally. Here’s a short summary of what I’ve been up to:

January had only just begun when I was flown over to San Jose to work at Facebook for a two week time-intensive project for one of our clients. The brief was to come up with a tightly integrated social experience for a fitness application.

January had only just begun when I was flown
over to San Jose to work at Facebook.

I learnt so much about how social works from the team at Facebook as well as gaining an insight in to their philosophies on shipping software, it was truly inspiring. I think we were also able to teach the Facebook developers a few things about their API coming from the perspective of users of the API.

In March, I got married to the beautiful Amy Adams (now Smith) after 7 years together. We got married in a manor house in Dorking. It tried to snow four times during the day, but it didn’t put a dampener on our special event. We went to Mexico for our honeymoon in April.

In May, I launched Dev Tool Secrets - a site dedicated to exposing more about the developer tools included within each browser. The site is hosted on Github so anyone can add contributions, I will be adding more tips during the next few months. I went on to do a number of presentations during June and July at London meet ups on developer tool secrets.

My Can I Use widget which allows bloggers to list browser compatibility when discussing features also gained a lot of traction during May thanks to a blog post from Bruce Lawson, and is now featured on several sites (such as CSS3 Click Chart) as well as in print on the “projects” front page of NET Magazine!

In July I launched Grunt Responsive Images, a Grunt task that resizes images based on a number of configurable parameters, especially useful for responsive websites. The plugin came about when I was architecting a solution for using responsive images uploaded by content authors. Grunt seemed like the perfect solution for this problem, and it only took a couple of evenings to get the first version of the plugin up and running.

In July, I also attended Hacked.io, a 24 hackathon in London’s O2 arena. Working alongside Abid Dinn, Chris Marsh and Tom Maton we produced a music quiz that hooked in to the Nokia Music API. We won 2 prizes - the Nokia Music API challenge, and one of the Heroku challenges. It was an awesome weekend.

In July, I also attended Hacked.io, a 24 hour hackathon in London’s O2 arena. We won 2 prizes.

In September, I wrote an 7 page article for NET Magazine on browser developer tools which became the cover article. It was exciting to see my article displayed proudly on the shelves of the local newsagents; especially as I’d been obsessed with creating my own magazines as a child. I don’t think my parents realised back then that one day I would be in print.

During November and December I’ve been working in Munich working on a exciting AngularJS web application due to launch in the Spring.

For two years prior I’d led a development team prototyping ideas and designs, and this launch will be the first part of the culmination of these efforts. To my knowledge this is one of the most exciting and in depth uses of AngularJS yet.

2013 was full of exciting moments and varied challenges; and I’m looking forward to further challenges in 2014. I already have a couple of articles and talks lined up; and I’ve got a couple of open source projects that I’ll be revealing over the next month or two. If you have a challenge you think I’d be interested in, please do get in touch. Happy New Year!