In Case You Missed It: 2016
Series: 2023, 2022, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013
Rather than a bunch of individual “In Case You Missed It” tweets, I thought I’d repeat what I’ve done the last three years (2013, 2014, 2015) and just do one big yearly semi-comprehensive recap of the web community things that I did this year.
Blog Posts
Top five posts written in 2016 ordered by 2016 page views and a bonus post because I have no idea how much traffic perfplanet gets.
- 52,000 views A Comprehensive Guide to Font Loading Strategies
- 25,341 views Web Fonts for President 2016: evaluating the font loading strategies of the US Presidential candidates.
- 14,873 views Critical Web Fonts: experimenting with a two stage approach to font loading.
- 11,953 views I Wanted to Type a Number: A post about the pitfalls that come with using
<input type="number">and mismatches that pit the specification against browser implementations. - 8,351 views The Web Fonts: Preloaded: experimenting with
rel="preload"for web fonts. - Unknown No @font-face Syntax will ever be Bulletproof, Nor Should It Be on the 2016 PerfPlanet Performance Calendar.
NEJSCONF
Our sophomore conference came after our sold-out first event last year in 2015. Our 2016 train themed single day single track conference sold out again with 200 attendees. We were excited to have an open call for proposals, a board game after party, and again blended both international and local speakers including keynotes from Justin Searls and Andrea Goulet. Check out these awesome event photos from Andrew Neely.
NebraskaJS
This is my fifth year as co-organizer of NebraskaJS. In 2015 we had 12 different meetups in Lincoln and Omaha, not counting the two TechOmaha developer group co-op parties, and a screening of What Comes Next is the Future at the Alamo Drafthouse (with huge thanks to Kathy Andersen for spearheading the event). We added 207 meetup members in 2016 and broke the 1,000 mark this year—amazing!
| Year | Membership | Change |
|---|---|---|
| 2009 | Founded | |
| 2012 | ~220 | |
| 2013 | 419 | (+199) |
| 2014 | 606 | (+187) |
| 2015 | 920 | (+314) |
| 2016 | 1127 | (+207) |
Talks
This year I decided to slow it down on public speaking. Nonetheless I did two small talks this year (neither of which are available online). The first was a NebraskaJS talk which ended up being about the dangers of media queries in re-usable component libraries (spoiler: we need container/element queries, stat). The second was a satirical talk at Barcamp Omaha about the spread of misinformation online called “The Earth is Flat—Separating Fact from Fiction on the Internet.” I originally planned to publish this one but when some flat-earthers messaged me on Twitter hoping that I’d help their cause, I learned something valuable about satire and changed my mind. Y’all—we can’t even poke fun at Flat Earthers without signal boosting them. Ugh.
Open Source
- Created faux-pas, a bookmarklet to highlight faux-rendered (bold or italic) and otherwise misconfigured webfonts (node/grunt/gulp components for this are coming soon).
browser-logo-icon-setis a grunticon icon set of multicolor vector/bitmap web browser logos (Demo).- Contributed a tiny PR to bramstein/stateofwebtype.
- Researched and filed four new issues on Scott Jehl’s
device-bugsrepo. - Created a repo for people to AMA.
- A bunch of other contributions to various Filament Group open source libraries that I won’t list individually.
Tweets
I had some good tweets this year, Brent.
please enter a password that has 8 characters or less pic.twitter.com/ICtuHwR1uw
— Zach Leatherman (@zachleat) September 20, 2016
when the font-size is too small but they used maximum-scale=1 pic.twitter.com/gr11m3xDYZ
— Zach Leatherman (@zachleat) September 15, 2016
proposal: make “framework” a standard unit of time
— Zach Leatherman (@zachleat) January 21, 2016
“I’ve been working at this job for 4.6 frameworks”
as part of her job at a zoo my wife breeds bugs and releases them into the wild
— Zach Leatherman (@zachleat) October 10, 2016
I never realized how similar our jobs were before now
Facebook ships an iOS app every 2 weeks—latest: 146MBhttps://t.co/lG5S2n9B5x is 776KB, 40KB primed
— Zach Leatherman (@zachleat) August 18, 2016
App download == 266 website visits/day
I guess we'll never know why people prefer to read news in apps over web sites.
— Zach Leatherman (@zachleat) May 15, 2016
re: https://t.co/FK02x7DKva pic.twitter.com/8Ig1n1BmJc
“Millions are using unsupported browsers and can’t access our site”
— Zach Leatherman (@zachleat) March 23, 2016
“…meh”
“NPM broke our build for an hour”
*rewrites entire app*
“I don’t think our users will…”
— Zach Leatherman (@zachleat) May 17, 2016
…want to hear the unsolicited generalization you’re about to make about them
Twitter to Apple News, eight steps to read an article:
— Zach Leatherman (@zachleat) May 23, 2016
🔈 alt: https://t.co/4W87r330mV pic.twitter.com/Cuvw0Ujc7u
Thank You Notes
Huge thank you to Nick Nisi my co-organizer for NebraskaJS; additionally the co-organizers of NEJS CONF: Jerod Santo, John Hobbs, Lindsey Pfeifer, Matt Steele, and Sandi Barr. Best co-organizers on the planet. Thank you to (almost) everyone that put in a proposal to speak at NEJS CONF. Thank you to everyone that volunteered or even attended NEJSCONF.
Thank you to everyone involved in organizing the TechOmaha co-op parties (Kevin Berry especially). Thank you to Kathy Andersen for spearheading the screening of Matt Griffin’s The Future is Next in Omaha.
And a huge thank you to Filament Group. I continue to feel as though I’m challenged to be a contributing citizen of the web development community as a part of this company and I love it.
And lastly, but most importantly to my wife and daughter: I love you both, dearly.