2022 Recap - James Brooks

With 2022 already being all but a distant memory, I thought it’d be nice to look back at the last year and reflect on the year long journey.

Laravel

Laravel Forge saw a lot of updates in 2022. Here are just some of the highlights:

We also shipped a lot of minor features and papercuts along the way, which really excites me. We sweat the details 🥵

I’m really proud of the work we do on Forge and the amount of time it saves developers every single day. As a customer, I couldn’t live without it! Oh, and there is a lot more to come here 😉

I also contributed a couple of features to the Laravel framework too:

Artisan about Command
New db:show, db:table and db:monitor Commands — these were particularly fun as my friend & colleague, Joe Dixon came to visit me and we hacked on these features together.

Becoming a Laracasts Educator

In June, Laracasts released an updated series on Laravel Forge, created by me!

Being asked to create a complete series (there are 24 videos) for Laracasts was an honour for me. Without Laracasts, I genuinely don’t believe I’d be working at Laravel now.

Also, being able to create this series was eye-opening. It’s extremely rewarding, but it’s also a lot of work. I already admired Jeffrey, but I have a new-found respect for the amount of effort he (and other educators) put into creating the material we take for granted.

Side Projects

I’ve continued working on Checkmango, the full-stack A/B testing platform I’ve been working on. Progress has been slow as I’ve been focused on lots of things in 2022, but it’s moving forward and that is all that matters.

The Laravel Artisan Cheatsheet saw a few updates, mostly to improve SEO. This year, I’d love to give it a visual refresh and upgrade to Nuxt.js v3.

I also released the Polestar Finder, a small web-app that notifies you when your Polestar 2 configuration becomes available. It was pretty popular on the Reddit and Facebook groups, and notified over 100 people that their configuration became available.

Speaking

I didn’t give any talks in 2022, but I did finally pluck up enough courage to submit a proposal to Laracon India, which was accepted!

I also started a new meet-up, PHP Stoke which will have its first meeting on the 14th January. PHP Stoke will be the first meet-up I’ve organised and my first talk of 2023.

Although I won’t be speaking at all of them, I’ll be attending:

I’d love to attend more meet-ups this year. If you’re organising a meet-up, please let me know and I’ll do my best to attend.

Education

I completed the St John’s Ambulance Mental Health Workplace Responder course in August. A good friend of mine asked whether I’d like to do the course and hold the position of "Mental Health Responder" for his business, which I jumped at the chance to do.

Aside from providing me with the skills for my friend, I also very much intend on restarting the Happy Dev podcast. I know, I’ve said this a few times now, but it really is true!

Running

2022 was the year that I really got into running. Strava says I ran a total of 165.7km over 38 activities and I spent 15 hours running... This is well over 100km more than I’ve run for any previous year.

I started attending our local park run (a 5k run) and that really got me going. I ran 14 park runs in 2022. Unfortunately, I did injure myself by pushing too hard, too quickly around August time and that led to shin splints which really set me back — I’ve learnt from that now.

For anyone interested, my current PBs:

5k: 25:07
10k: 57:13

I’ve also started 2023 by signing up for my first half-marathon (Potters ’Arf). The Potters ’Arf marathon is notorious for its hills and difficulty, so the training begins now!

Conclusion

These are just some of my 2022 highlights. I have a strong feeling that 2023 will be an even bigger year, packed full of excitement. I’m travelling a lot more this year and I can’t wait to see your beautiful faces.

Your Recaps

If you’ve written a 2022 recap, let me know and I’ll add it here: