This year I decided to try and get back to blogging a bit more in an effort to help track my own progress for things that I've learned throughout the year and also as a way to help others out.

To help me focus on writing on a regular basis I picked 2 areas that I enjoy as a Web Developer. One area, was a monthly summary of the most interesting tech news I've read the last 30 days and the other area was a weekly 'tweet sized' dev tip.

My site traffic is slowly going up but that was never the point of all of this. I'm not agressively looking to increase traffic, if it happens, brilliant, but I'm actually doing this for myself to help me keep track of the cool little posts I read or the handy tips I come across.

2018 was also the year that I finally became a home owner! It's been a crazy journey getting here but it's a very exciting time.

As this is a summary post, I'm listing below all the Friday Dev Tips below. I'm always open to hear tips from others so feel free to reach out to me on Twitter or through the contact form here on my site.

My 2018 Friday Dev Tips:

• Use Bracket Pair Colorizer to match bracket pairs
• How to auto update your Windows programs using Chocolatey
• Always have a backup strategy
• Quickly open the command line to a specific path from Windows Explorer
• Display pinned tabs on a separate line in Visual Studio
• Theme Visual Studio Code in seconds
• Quickly jump between methods in Visual Studio
• Use an app launcher to quickly open files or programs on your Windows PC
• Use SlowCheetah to preview your Web.Config transforms
• How to search for a changeset in TFS using Visual Studio
• How to make gifs using LICEcap
• How to visualize an image map so you can debug it
• Master keyboard shortcuts to make your developer life easier
• How to print from Visual Studio Code
• Share the perfect code snippet using Polacode
• The simplest way to take a screenshot in Windows 10
• How to automatically highlight your current file in the Solution Explorer

Projects I completed in work:

My day to day job is working on Avon.com with a great team in 8 West Consulting. This year I got to work on some interesting tech on the site, below is just a highlight:

I added a brand new custom homepage for representatives that can be customized using modules from Umbraco.

I worked on adding in proper user accessibility to the Avon.com website. Now users can tab through pretty much all areas on the site. There is still a lot more work to do here that I'm hoping to get stuck into early next year.

I extended the built-in ASP.NET bundler so that our bundled & minified javascript and stylesheet files would include a file extension. We had to do this so that a third party CDN can correctly cache and serve these files.

On my own personal sites I setup Stripe payments, BuyMeACoffee and tweaked the Google Ads on my sites.

Upskilling:

I spent the year improving my Angular knowledge by watching and working alongside the excellent Ultimate Angular courses by Todd Motto. This also included courses on TypeScript and Redux.

Wrapping up the year I completed Tealium Tag Manager training. Avon uses this to help manage all their third party vendors on the site.

My plans for 2019:

Angular is showing no signs of slowing down so next year I'm hoping to continue with on with my Angular training.

Now that my Tealium training is complete I'm hopefully going to successfully complete the certification.

Lastly for 2019, I hope to find time to update my personal site, https://www.richardreddy.ie, and put up a landing page for my company: https://www.codepixelstudios.com

So that was 2018. It was an action packed year. Here's to 2019 and all the adventures that come with it! How was 2018 for you? Did you work on anything interesting this year? Let me know in the comments below.