I have never done one of these posts before, but this year has been a very busy year so I though it might be interesting to list some of my achievements this year.

Personal

The blog is back

I managed to keep the blog alive this year. When I set out to revive it at the end of last year I wasn’t sure if I would actualy keep up the posts. But I managed to keep posting throughout the year and want to continue posting.

Building a new Bass

It’s been a long and slow project starting early in the year. This is my 3rd Bass guitar that I have built from scratch and I’m hoping to complete it by the end of the year. It’s a 5 string multiscale bass. The neck is multi-laminated Maple and Merbau, with a ‘holy moly’ fretboard (old wharf timber eaten by marine borers) filled with white resin. The body is has been painted in an ‘arctic sparkle’ effect with a white pearl base and gold metal flake.

Achievements on BMX

BMX was my activity of choice when I was a teenager and into my early twenties. During the pandemic I started getting back into it and this year has seen several achievements of tricks I dreamt of when I was younger but never tried or landed. They include a truck driver (360 while spinning the handlebars a full rotation) and a barspin air on a quarterpipe.

Here is a short reel from Instagram around mid-year:

Work

It was a very busy year at my day job with Litmos. Below are some of my highlights.

Developed a React UI library in Typescript

I developed a UI library for new UI work in the core Litmos LMS application using React and Typescript. Built using react-aria this library allowed multiple teams to deliver redeveloped and modernized pages for our learner experience. The core application is built in .NET, so there were challenges integrating with the legacy codebase, as well as obstacles around sharing front-end code between multiple projects and teams around the globe. We used module federation to solve some of these problems.

Helped deliver a new Achievements dashboard

I built a customizable drag-and-drop dashboard engine for displaying widgets on a new learner Achievements dashboard. Some technologies used include Pragmatic DnD, CSS View Transitions, Container Queries, React reverse portals and Tanstack Query. The widgets are built using the above mentioned UI library built on React Aria.

Generative AI

Content Author is a component-based e-learning authoring tool that I developed for Litmos, and the main product I work on. This year I worked with a team to develop multiple generative AI features for the tool. Features included generating components and even entire modules, either from LLM knowledge, existing content in the library or from uploaded source documents.

Hundreds of accessbility fixes

Earlier in the year I worked with a team of contractors to fix hundreds of a11y issues in our legacy codebase which were reported from an external a11y audit. Fixes ranged from simple color contrast and label issues, to more complex focus management and screenreader announcements.

It has been a huge year with many achievements and I’m looking forward to seeing what 2025 brings.