Assumed audience: People who like reading year-in-review summaries. (I always assume that’s mostly just me, a few years in the future!)
A bit of context: For many years now, I have made it my habit to write up one of these summaries. In this case, I have tried to make it a bit more digestible by breaking into smaller chunks. You can find them all at the root of this little ‘series’.
Public speaking of all sorts remains an important part of the work I want to do — writing and speaking are complementary, rather than replacements for each other — and 2022 was a decent year for speaking for me.
I set out with a goal of giving two conference talks, and I was on track to do just that… and then Russia invaded Ukraine, leading to the cancellation of TypeVille in Poland. I was quite disappointed about that cancellation — that trip would have been a ton of fun — but it was 100% the right call, and that mild disappoint is of course nothing compared to the horrors of war faced by Ukrainians. I would still like to find a venue for the talk I was prepping for TypeVille, “Types as Tools for Thought”: I think the material is good and worth getting out into the world.1 I did still give one talk at EmberConf: The Road to TypeScript.
I hosted no podcasts this year, but I did appear on two podcasts this year:
-
Whiskey, Web, and Whatnot: Bringing Types to Ember with Chris Krycho, in which we had a nice discussion about some of the same themes as my EmberConf talk… and also a solid whiskey I have slowly enjoyed through the rest of the year.
-
Rustacean Station: New Rustacean with Chris Krycho, in which I chatted with one of the hosts of the Rustacean Station podcast about what I have been up to in and around Rust since wrapping up New Rustacean a few years ago. We talked about Volta, the possibilities afforded by and challenges presented by WebAssembly, where Rust is and is not a good fit and why it has not been a large part of my day job lately, and also some details about how I did podcasting. It was fun to podcast about Rust again!
Finally, I also published a number of videos to YouTube — something more or less totally new for me! Some of those came out of work: whenever I’m doing or explaining something for open source that I think can benefit others, I am trying to record it and publish it, like in Wacky Tricks We Use in Publishing TypeScript Types (in Ember.js) or some of the streaming I have done.
The biggest video I published was Work tracking with Obsidian embeds, a complement to my post Writing Down What I Do — In Obsidian. It’s small by YouTube standards (about 3.4k views as of this writing), but that is pretty decent traction given I have very few subscribers and no regular posting habit. I plan to do more of both of those kinds of things in the future: again, they complement the writing work I do here.
Notes
I would also like to get that same material written up as an essay. An essay form would have very different strengths and weaknesses than a conference talk, and — critically — would be different from just having a transcript of the talk. I think that basic approach and format, of paired essay and talk, is one I would like to explore a lot more in the next half decade. ↩︎