# 2017: another year in review

DevFeed: [2017: another year in review](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/2017-another-year-in-review-35503.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://meowni.ca/posts/2017-in-review/>)

Author: Monica Dinculescu

Published: 2018-01-02T00:00:00Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Monica Dinculescu](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/monica-dinculescu.md>)

Topics: [Post Mortem](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/post-mortem.md>), [Redux](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/redux.md>), [GitHub](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/github.md>)

Tags: [2017](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/2017.md>), [post-mortem](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/post-mortem.md>), [redux](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/redux.md>), [year-in-review](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/year-in-review.md>)

## AI overview

A personal review of 2017 that reassesses the author's year through projects, contributions, talks, conferences, side projects, time off, and involvement with the Unicode Emoji committee. The author concludes that fewer contributions or talks did not mean the year was unsuccessful.

## Source excerpt

You can tell I hate writing year in reviews because this one is really, really late. I tend to hate bragging, and I definitely hate introspective and, in particular, I always think I am underperforming (and that's fine). However, that's usually not true, and writing a year in review forces me to see the awesome things I did, so even if I did end up underperforming, at least I can learn from that. That's the whole point of post-mortems, right? As usual, here's life as GitHub saw it. Red text is projects I've shipped, black text is conferences I've spoken at. Technically I didn't speak at Blinkon, but I spoke to people at it so hey, counting it. The reason why this post mortem is important to me is that before writing it, I literally thought this year was bad and I just "did fewer things". But that's not actually true! I wrote less code than in 2016 (2713 vs 3153 contributions), but that's totally irrelevant? GitHub contributions are a fake idea, and I'm the first one to tell you this, so I don't know why I get worked up about them every year. I contributed to weird branches (which don't get counted), and did a lot of weird explorations that obviously never got merged. I planned things. I wrote design documents. I reviewed design documents. I formed strong opinions. I learnt Redux. Eat it, contributions graph. I gave fewer talks than in 2016 (7 vs 8), but I enjoyed conferences more. I went to a conference where I only hung out with badass women. I went to Railscamp, where I had no wifi and canoed and wore a headlamp like a giant dork. I MC-ed Chrome Dev Summit with Mariko, which was scary, and intimidating and incredibly fun. I built more side projects (10 vs 9). One of them got featured in The Verge! I worked fewer weekends (16 vs 28 days. Goal: 0). And I don't mean on work-work, I mean, at all. On the weekends I play Stardew Valley, or make pottery, or knit, or watch an entire season of Riverdale because I can. Maybe this means I'll work on fewer side-things, and ma