2018 Year in Review

Every year I start writing one of these end-of-the-year posts and never finish them. I decided that I’m going to finish this one, even if it is a bit late. So here is my first annual (hopefully) year in review.

Professional

Some of the things I accomplished in 2018:

  • My first Progressive Web App: After hearing a lot about PWAs, I decided to try building one myself on NateDillon.com.
  • K-State Connect: Ongoing refactor work, added integration with K-State’s new workflow software, and turned Connect into a Progressive Web App.
  • K-State Graduate School Forms: This was my biggest project of the year — converting a set of paper forms to digital and adding them to our K-State’s workflow software. This was our first project with the software, and it required designing and building a custom frontend. Hopefully I’ll have more written about this project in the near future.
  • Tallgrass Community Church: An ongoing project, building my church’s website in Drupal, my first real project using Drupal 8. The current site was done pretty quickly on a short timeline and now needs to be refined (and probably redesigned).
  • An Event Apart Seattle and Orlando: After missing out on being able to attend a conference in 2017, I was able to get to two An Event Apart conferences in 2018. Both were amazing as usual.

Personal

Here are my highlights (and lowlights) of 2018:

  • Tallgrass Community Church: We were part of the launch team to start our new church in April.
  • Tulsa, Dallas, and Oklahoma City: After our annual family reunion in Tulsa, we took the kids to visit some friends in Dallas, checking out the Dallas World Aquarium and the George W. Bush Presidential Library (both are worth a visit). On the way home, we stopped for a couple days in Oklahoma City, checking out the zoo and the Science Museum Oklahoma. I had not been to the science museum since I was a kid, and it was really good.
  • World’s of Fun: My first time back here in probably 15 or 20 years.
  • Medical issues: More medical stuff this year than I’ve ever had before. Getting old sucks.
  • Walt Disney World: An Event Apart Orlando took place on Disney property, and I was able to stay a couple extra days and check out the parks. I’ve got quite the streak going, having been to a Disney park 5 years in a row now.

Reading

I’ve never been a big reader, and I only finished half as many books in 2018 as I did in 2017. I would really like to finish out the A Book Apart series and read more fiction in 2019.

Here are the books I read in 2018:

Writing

I didn’t do much writing in 2018. I published 28 blog posts, but 26 of those were conference notes. It will be a goal of mine to do better in 2019.

Movies

According to my Letterboxd year in review, I logged 114 films in 2018. Be sure to check out the Letterboxd 2018 Year in Review.

Here are the movies released in 2018 that I was able to watch last year:

Gaming

I’ve started doing a bit more gaming in the past year or so, playing at work a bit during my lunch breaks. I dusted off my PS3 and started playing through all the games I never got to in the past. After I finish those, I think I’ll start on my Wii games. It seems that I rarely play games less than 5 years old at this point, so check out my much-delayed reactions below.

Here are all the games I played in 2018:

Links

Here are links to some other end-of-the-year posts: