It's been a difficult year. I think if I do a review maybe that will help get the negatives of the year out of the way.
The year of no meet ups.
This year travel was restricted. Non essential travel was reduced. Conventions and meetups went online For much of the US this stated in March or April. Here in Nashville we lost meetups earlier than that.
In February several of the local meetup groups lost their location. The company that provided the space changed insurance and it no longer covered the non-company events. Little notice was given and groups had to find somewhere else to go. Some went online which turned out to be a good test for the year. Others found a spot for the moment. One turn out to be about a mile from my house. I had conflicting plans so couldn't make that one. I thought next month for sure. Then March happened.
March 2 tornados hit Nashville. This happened late at night and a large portion of the city lost power. Schools were closed for a week. People were asked not to travel in the affected areas. Meetup that week were cancelled. The city got power restored and started clean up. This was about the time the area had the first confirmed Covid cases.
Schools retuned a week later. But they started sending alerts on how they were cleaning nightly for Covid prevention. Across the country some schools were starting to shutdown. We got three days of classes before they said they were closing early for Spring Break. They didn't go back after Spring Break. The lockdown started. Meetups moved online. We all learned Zoom.
Once meetup and Conventions went virtual I got to attend many that I wouldn't have otherwise. I went to several online Conventions that I would not have been able to attend in person.
New friends
I joined Virtual Coffee which grew from developer seeking to make human connection outside of their bubbles. The group is extremely welcoming. It great to have a weekly meeting to look forward to. They are also the main reason I completed HacktoberFest this year. I got to help build on the VirtualCoffee.io site and get to learn a bit about 11ty.
Side Projects and Learning
I returned to blogging. With Covid hitting and meeting reduced I decided I needed to start blogging regularly. I committed to blogging at least once a week. I've had look for subject to blog about and that had helped me dig deeper into CSS and Accessibility. I've done a couple CSS series and learned a few trick while building things. I made a post of ALT tags and want to do more on accessibility.
I've also built a couple minigames with Javascript. And have a Python project, I want to complete.
I'm hoping for much better things in the new year.
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