A Round-Up of 2017 Round-Ups

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This week marked the beginning of a new year and with it came a slew of excellent write-ups from folks in our industry reflecting on the year past. We thought it would be nice to compile them together for easy reference. If you know of any others that should be on everyone’s radar, please leave it in the comments.

Now on to the round-up of round-ups!

Rachel Andrew

Having been wandering the globe talking about CSS Grid for almost five years, Grid finally shipped in browsers in 2017. This was good, as I didn’t really want to be some kind of CSS vapourware lady. I knew Grid was important the first time I read the initial spec. I had no idea how my championing of the specification would change my life, and allow me to get to work with so many interesting people.

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Geri Coady

One of my biggest achievements this year was the release of my second book, Color Accessibility Workflows, published by A Book Apart. I’m hugely grateful for any opportunity to talk about color and how it can impact people in the digital world, and writing for A Book Apart has long been a dream of mine.

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Monica Dinculescu

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?

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Sarah Drasner

This year has been a surreal one for me. I’ve had years that were particularly tough, years that trended more cheerfully, but 2017 was unique and bizarre because I felt an immense guilt in my happiness.

I think this might have been the year I found the most personal happiness, but the giant caveat in everything was watching the world divide, watching racism, sexism and hatred rise, and seeing some real damage that incurred on people’s lives around the world.

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Brad Frost

Throughout 2017, when people asked how I was doing, I’d say “Great…for the things I can control.” 2017 was a rough year at a macro level for everybody, and I found myself coping with the state of the world in a number of different ways. But on a personal level, I had a rewarding year full of a lot of work, a lot of travel, and even some major life changes.

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Geoff Graham

It feels kind of weird to include my own round-up, but whatever.

I’ve typically set goals for myself at the start of each year and followed up on them somewhere towards the end of the year. Unfortunately, the last time I did that out loud was in 2014. I’ve been pretty quiet about my goals and general life updates since then and it’s certainly not for lack of things to write about. So, I’m giving this whole reflection thing the ol’ college go once again.

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Jeremy Keith

Jeremy published 78 blog posts in 2017 (or 6.5 per month as he calculates it) and noted his personal favorites.

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Zach Leatherman

I had an incredibly productive year of side projects, learning, and blog posts—I can attribute almost all of that rediscovered time and energy to quitting Facebook very early in the year. It’s also been amazing to see my daughter grow and learn—she turned two this year and I really love being a dad. We now have our own secret handshake and it’s my favorite thing.

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Ethan Marcotte

And finally, one of the things I’m most proud of is, well, this little website, which I launched hastily just over a year ago. And over the last entirely-too-eventful year, I’ve surprised myself with just how much it helped to be blogging again. Because while the world’s been not-so-lightly smoldering, it felt—and feels—good to put words in a place where I can write, think, and tinker, a place that isn’t Twitter, a place that’s mine.

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Eric Meyer

While this is not so much a reflection on the past year, Eric did mark the new year with a livestream redesign of his personal website—the first design update in 13 years.

My core goal was to make the site, particularly blog posts, more readable and inviting. I think I achieved that, and I hope you agree. The design should be more responsive-friendly than before, and I think all my flex and grid uses are progressively enhanced. I do still need to better optimize my use of images, something I hope to start working on this week.

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Dave Rupert

My big work task this year was building a Pattern Library and it’s exciting to see that work beginning to roll out. The most gratifying aspect is seeing the ultimate Pattern Library thesis proven out: Speed. Pages load faster, CMS integrations are faster, and we can successfully turn out new production pages within a 1-day turnaround.

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David Walsh

David used the new year to think about and plot upcoming goals.

Every turn of the year is a new opportunity to start over, set goals, and renew optimism that time can heal wounds and drive us to change and achieve. For me 2018 is my most important year in a long time; 2018 needs to serve as a turning point for this blog and my career.

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Trent Walton

Dave, Reagan, and I celebrated our 10th official year as Paravel. In addition to some shorter-term projects, we undertook a large-scale pattern library and front-end update that is rolling out in phases this year. We’ve also enjoyed bringing in 6+ collaborators/teams to assist with projects when the need has arisen. I bet we do more of this in 2018—collaborating with friends has been fun.

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CSS-Tricks

Think we’d leave out our own round-up? Of all the site stats Chris shared in this post, this one nicely summed up the action around here in 2017:

We were on a publishing roll though! We published 595 posts, blowing away last year with only 442, the previous record. We also published 50 pages (i.e. snippets/videos/almanac entries) beating 43 last year. Certainly, we’re in favor of quality over quantity, but I think this is a healthy publishing pace when our goal is to be read, in a sense, like a magazine.

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