Dan Williams had an incredible 2014 and, reading his, I was (1) massively impressed and (2) inspired to do my own. I’ve stolen his format and everything.

2014 was the year I became a front-end developer at the Government Digital Service. I set up this blog. I started Tampon Club, and 2 new Tumblrs. I took a really good holiday. I did a bit of public speaking and I was on telly.

Work

I joined GDS in January. It’s going pretty good. Since joining I’ve:

• made about 700 contributions to government repositories
• started line managing juniors
• co-run weekly frontend meetings for GDS frontend developers
• MC’d the GDS Christmas all-hands
• written a blog post for the GDS tech blog about accessibility on GOV.UK
• Helped interview developers for three different sets of developer interviews
• started mentoring a colleague

Things I’ve failed at

I have to write this here because that list makes me sound like I’m kind of full of myself. I definitely did fuck some stuff up this year too. I made a list of cockups and looking at them the general theme is giving up too soon on things/people/opportunities when stuff became hard or I got too busy. I should probably say yes to fewer things. The other bad thing I did this year was type a password into a public channel by accident twice. Both times this was swiftly resolved, but gosh, it’s embarrassing when that happens.

Bloggering

This year I started a blog. You’re reading it. I built it myself and it’s… fine? Laughably simple, but you can see all these words so I guess it works. The good thing about blogs is that when you have one you can write stuff without needing to set up a blog first. The bad thing about blogs is that the you end up with a drafts folder full of things you gave up on because they turned out to be hard to explain. Here are the titles of my unpublished folder right now:

• Accessibility -this is a post about how accessibility is sort of like a cake
• Select tags writeup -this is a post of a writeup of a talk. Its really long
• Tampon club for dudes -this is a post about what to do if you’re a dude and you care about Tampon Club

Anyway, two of those will get published one day. One probably won’t.

Tampon Club

Another thing I did this year was founding Tampon Club. It has a website. People have written things about it:

• www.howwegettonext.com
• Vice

I was also asked onto BBC Radio 5 Live’s breakfast show to talk about it. The audio for that is here on my Tumblr.

Tumblrs

I started two new tumblrs:

• one for my nail art nails.butt.kitchen
• one for my sewing sewing.butt.kitchen. I sewed 14 things this year; 2 kindle cases, 6 shirts, 3 t-shirts one shirt-dress, one vest, and one quilt. I also abandoned 1 dress, 1 vest, 1 shirt, 1 playsuit and one shirt-dress because I screwed them up beyond repair :(

Holiday

I went on a cracking holiday with Lachie. We did an american road trip from Denver to Vegas.

It was beautiful!

Public speaking

I gave three talks this year and was on one panel:

• Five facts about smell- the lightning talk at LRUG -Video
• Edge 3- the future of the web -Video
• Dump your select tags - Nightly Build in Cologne
• Dump your select tags - Epic FEL. -Video

And finally

I was on the Alan Titchmarsh TV show back in February for a feature about nail art. I took a colleague on with me, Amy, and we had a reeeeally fun time. Live telly is quite good. Here is the video. I’m clearly petrified.