I’m not really sure that this works as its own blog post. But I thought it was so cool that I had to share.

In 2015, I spoke at all four lightning talks at OKCjs. This feels like such a huge accomplishment for me.

A little bit of introspection never hurt anybody, and it feels appropriate at this time of year to look back and see how far I’ve come.

The first lightning talk I gave was in February. I wrote a goofy game called ‘Can You Date?’ You can check it out here. This was the first complete application I had ever written. I wrote it in plain old vanilla JavaScript using native prompts and alerts. I look back at this and have to laugh. It’s good to have earlier projects to go back and look at periodically.

The second lightning talk I gave in May was about how to plan a program from a beginner perspective. I’m so big on planning out programs that I wrote a blog post about it in addition to giving my talk. You can see that here. I didn’t have anything written specifically for this talk, although I did use my TwisterJS app as an example. I’m planning to rework that in 2016 and make it even better using the new things I’ve learned.

My third lightning talk was an intro to libraries. This talk didn’t have any code to go along with it either, but I did enjoy explaining how libraries work, and what they are. You can check out the blog post I wrote about the talk here.

My last lightning talk was just this month. I spoke about building an Ionic app. The app I wrote as an example for this was a silly movie countdown. I used it to countdown to the new Star Wars movie. You can check it out here. It still needs some polishing, but it’s miles away from the ‘Can You Date?’ game I wrote back in February. (Blog post here.)

In case you’re wondering why it’s called ‘IMDb Killer’, it’s because this random troll started tweeting me about how unoriginal my idea was. It was all just so funny to me that he seemed so offended on IMDb’s behalf, that I named it ‘IMDb Killer’. On the off-chance that this makes it to the Google Play store, or App Store, I am absolutely planning on changing the name.

In addition to lightning talks, I also spoke at Tulsa Tech Fest. My talk was called Junior to Jedi, and while I probably wasn’t ready to give a talk at a conference, I’m really glad I did. (Blog post here.)

2015 wasn’t all just me yammering on though, I also attending Thunder Plains, which was amazing.

And that was 2015 for me. It was super eventful, but equally fun.

I’m really struggling at a good, non-sappy way to end this post, so I think I’ll just cut it off here.

Happy New Year, my JavaScript friends!