Not gonna lie, 2024 was a wild ride.
OpenSauced
Starting 2024 was my fourth month at OpenSauced. We went full tilt with feature development. The team was crushing it, and we shipped and shipped.
In April, we had our offsite in Miami which was awesome, and my CEO @bdougieyo was giving a talk at React Miami, so we all got to hang at React Miami as well. Lots of fun and it was so great hanging with the team for the week.
Here are a few pics from React Miami. What a great conference.
Coming off the heals of React Miami, we had a really successful Product Hunt Launch too for StarSearch.
We kept on shipping and eventually, we got acquired by the Linux Foundation.
Unfortunately, me and several others didn't make it along for the ride. Was I bummed out? Definitely, but after a few weeks, I got out of my slump, and started looking for my next role. More on that later.
A few things stand out for me at OpenSauced. One, it's the best team I've ever worked with. Shoutouts to bdougie, @jpmcb, @brandontroberts, @zeucapua, @bekahhw, @isabensusan and Chris. We were a small but mighty team.
I'm also really proud of all the things I shipped, and I still love this stat. I removed more code than I added while still shipping so much.
Conference Speaking
In February, I gave my first in-person conference talk, two in fact at Confoo. Prior to this I had given several virtual conference talks.
Fall got really interesting - ended up giving two conference talks. Dove into HTML forms at Netlify Compose in early October.
It was also my first time to get to actually hang out in San Francisco. Big ups to the hype crew!
I also got to meet up with Bdougie for drinks and good food. It was great just hanging one on one.
In late October, I had the privilege of attending my first All Things Open conference in North Carolina and also gave a talk about Fresh (the Deno framework)!
There are more pics, but at the risk of flooding this post with all of them, just go check out the #AllThingsOpen hashtag on X.
Both in person conferences were outstanding, and it was so great hanging with new and old friends.
If you want to check out the talks/slide deck etc. head on over to my Talks page.
The Big Change
Then came the curveball: Linux Foundation acquired us, as I mentioned up top. Great news for the company, but a bunch of us didn't come along for the ride. I'm still really proud of all of us to making this happen. Even though I was bummed out about this initially, I got out of my mini funk and started the job hunt.
Job hunting in tech right now is... something else. Cold applications were mostly crickets, but my network really came through with interview opportunities. As the year wraps up, I'm in final rounds with some promising companies - fingers crossed for early 2025.
One thing that has been really great about all this is I've been enjoying the time off. I've been doing some contract work to cure my boredom as I work on landing my next role, but it's been a really great and much needed break for me.
Community and Content
Even with all the career stuff, I kept contributing to the community. Wrote a bunch of blog posts - my GitHub Copilot extension piece really took off.
That led to creating a template repo and even getting invited to GitHub's Open Source Friday stream to talk about it.
nickytonline
/
copilot-extension-template
A GitHub Copilot Extension Template
A Template for Your First Copilot Extension
This is a template for creating your first Copilot extension. It's a simple Node.js app that uses Hono and leverages the GitHub Copilot Extension Preview SDK for JavaScript.
Installation
Run the following commands to install and start the application locally
npm install
npm run dev
open http://localhost:3000
Development Environment
To get up and running with your development environment, see the Development Guide.
Guest Appearances
- Was on an episode of @jlengstorf‘s 4 Web Devs, 1 App Idea
- Got to hang with Shashi Lo and the Grid Iron Survivor crew
- Was a guest on This Dot‘s Modern Web Podcast discussing TypeScript and Open Source
- Was a guest on the GitHub OpenSource Friday live stream to showcase my Copilot Extension template
If you're interested, you can check out all my video based guest appearances on my Guest Appearances playlist.
Live Streaming
It was another year of great guests on nickyt.live. Thanks to everyone that tuned in and thanks so much to all my guests.
Here's the latest episode if you want a taste of what my live streams are like.
Also, big ups to @remotesynth for letting me ramble on my 2 Full 2 Stack show on the Certified Fresh Events YouTube channel.
Catch the latest episode if you haven't seen any of these before.
Wrapping Up
Plenty of achievements that I'm proud of this year.
- Led frontend at OpenSauced including building out the frontend experiences for our AI offering StarSearch
- Built out a proof of concept GitHub Copilot extension for OpenSauced
- OpenSauced got acquired by the Linux Foundation
- Started learning Go
- Joined Cloudinary as an ambassador
- Went past 100K followers on the dev.to community 🚀
- Delivered talks at Global Summit for Node.js '24, XtremeJS, All Things Open Conference, ConFoo.ca, and Netlify Compose 2024
- Another successful year of the 2 Full 2 Stack show
- Got to hang with a tonne of amazing guests on my live stream nickyt.live
Looking Forward
Looking back, 2024 definitely didn't go exactly as planned, but nothing is certain these days. The tech world keeps changing and you just gotta roll with it. Excited to see what 2025 brings - I've got a feeling it's gonna be good.
If you want to stay in touch, all my socials are on nickyt.online
Top comments (6)
Congrats on all the great talks and can't wait to see where you land next!
Thanks Jess!
This was a awesome year for you! Congrats again for your contributions 🤩✨
This year has been incredible for you! Huge congrats for all your amazing contributions 🎉🌟