I’ve grown a lot over the last year at my job. Things are never really the same for long, and I’ve had a ton of different challenges to tackle – both on the technical side, but in a growing proportion on the side of people management and technical leadership, too. So I wanted to share some of the books I’ve loved over the last year, which I would recommend even to developers who aren’t currently managing people or projects.

I started looking into this topic because, as you’ve probably heard, Google changed its pagespeed insights tool (and search ranking algorithm) to focus on mobile-first. I’ve got an image-heavy blog that does pretty well in Google, but my pagespeed score was somewhere between 75 and 80. One of Google’s biggest complaints to me were that my images were not resized properly. The only problem is I have hundreds of images on that blog, and there was no way on earth I was going to actually create mobile-friendly versions of every single image.

It’s not that often that I go to a conference or watch a talk on YouTube that truly changes the way I think about programming or software development. Even though I’m someone who does frontend development for a living, most of the talks that were most illuminating for me are technical talks that are either language-agnostic or unrelated to my daily work. Here are a few of the best talks I’ve ever seen on programming or the field of technology (in no specific order!

This blog is written with Hugo, a static site generator written in Go. I also have a second blog that uses Hugo as well - and while I love the speed and simplicity of this system, it’s still a pain to deploy by ssh-ing into my remote machine, pull updates, and build manually. Even when I can authenticate via YubiKey ;) So over the Christmas holiday, I automated the deployment of this blog whenever I push to the master branch.

What’s a YubiKey? A YubiKey is basically a tiny device that plugs into your USB slot and pretends to be a keyboard. When you tap the little golden disc, it types out a One Time Password (OTP). Through the Yubico API, you can easily validate this password, and use it in combination with another method of authentication (such as a password or ssh key) to achieve two-factor authentication (2FA). Many popular websites like Google, Facebook, and Github allow you to enable 2FA via YubiKeys.