As of February 1st I have been at Google for two years! Yay! It has been an amazing time and I am truly honored to work for such a company.
A year ago (+1 week) I wrote about my
first year experiences, it was pretty crazy in my first year, not only did the scale of the work hit me overwhelm me, but so did the sheer number of excellent engineers and colleagues. My overall feeling was one of awe.
My second year has taken that to the next level again!
One of the highlights of the year was that I got to speak at Google IO - Mobile Web App development: Zero to Hero, where myself and
Mike Mahemoff (with the help of
Eric Bidelman and
Boris Smus) built an app that worked across 5 different form factors using
one code base - the awesome thing about this is that we built
LeviRoutes (a url routing framework) and
FormfactorJS (a form factor detection library).
I got to travel a lot too - I am trying to count all the countries that I have been too; it is a lot - USA, France, Spain, Portugal, Romania, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Netherlands, Czech Republic. Whilst I was traveling I did a
lot of presentations which is a really good way to meet people that I wouldn't normally get the chance to meet. I also managed to get completely misquoted on
TechCrunch too - I say misquoted, I didn't even say the words that they attributed to me.
The biggest thing for me was that
Web Intents became a real living and breathing project and first native implementations have landed in Chrome, it has changed a lot since my first announcement late in 2010. This is a huge change for users of the web and I am immensely proud to be working on the project and with some amazingly talented engineers (
James Hawkins,
Greg Billock,
Rachel Blum, Ben Smith and many others) and helping to define the specifications. We have big goals for Web Intents so stay tuned.
One of my resolutions last year was to be in Liverpool a little more and
I managed to do that, it turns out that I unwittingly pre-announced another project (that I honestly had no idea was about to launch) I am glad it happened though, there are a huge swath of developers in the UK that are outside London and I don't think anyone reaches them properly and this gives me a chance to work with them.
So. What is happening in the year to come? It is hard to say, there are a lot of cool things happening, but I know two things for sure: we will keep working on making sure users' experience of the web is improved through technologies such as
Web Intents and we will keep working with developers to build awesome sites and applications on the web and prove that the web is our future.
On to my third year!
I lead the Chrome Developer Relations team at Google.
We want people to have the best experience possible on the web without
having to install a native app or produce content in a walled garden.
Our team tries to make it easier
for developers to build on the web by supporting every Chrome release, creating great content to support
developers on web.dev, contributing to MDN, helping to improve browser
compatibility, and some of the best
developer tools like Lighthouse, Workbox, Squoosh to name just a few.
I love to learn about what you are building, and how I can help with
Chrome or Web development in general, so if you want to chat with me
directly, please feel free to book
a consultation.
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