Blog - Zeno Rocha

2015: The year I moved to California

2016-07-01T00:00:00-07:00

Moving to another country means starting a life from zero. I knew that before getting myself into it, but you only realize how hard it is when you actually do it.

Every year I document some of the challenges I faced and lessons I learned along the way (2014, 2013, 2012, 2011).

For this year’s self-centric-review I would like to take a step back and highlight the amazing moments that happened. Make yourself confortable and enjoy the ride!

Personal Stuff

For the last few years I’ve dedicated my life completely to work.

In fact, it’s pretty hard for me to write down that sentence ‘cause I don’t know if I should feel proud or ashamed of it. The thing is, 2015 was an exception.

January, started to live together with Carol. The craziest yet most loving little girl in the planet.
March, moved to US for good. A plan I had for a very long time finally became true.
April, rented and furnished my entire home for the first time. Thanks IKEA <3
June, bought my first car. I never liked cars but it’s impossible to not have one in LA.
November, got a dog. Which makes me think: “How could I lived without one for such a long time?”.

These achievements were huge and probably the most important things that happened to me this year. You can even stop reading here, everything described below are just minor stuff ;)

Talks

As I said before, moving to a new country is not an easy task. That’s why I decided to slow down with that crazy traveling schedule. I learned to say “no” and that’s helping me to enjoy life more ;)

Highlights

My favorite talk this year was at Nordic.js in Stockholm. The event was pretty well organized and I had tons of fun at the ping pong party.

And the most challenging event was a 40-hour workshop I gave at Fresno’s City College. It was completely energy draining but I learned valuable lessons from students and teachers.

Stats

2015: 11 talks and 1 workshop. 7 cities in 4 different countries.
2014: 21 talks and 4 workshops. 18 cities in 8 different countries.
2013: 18 talks and 3 workshops. 12 cities in 3 different countries.
2012: 24 talks. 13 cities in 3 different countries.

Blogposts

2015 was the year of Medium for me. Pretty much everything that I wrote was published there. I’m in love with their platform and I don’t think this is going to change very soon.

Highlights

Surprisingly enough, the most impactful piece of text I wrote this year was not in any blog. It was on a GitHub issue. In the end I replicated that text on Medium as “How did clipboard.js get 5000 stars in a few days?”.

However, my favorite one was written couple weeks ago, just before New Year’s. It’s called “What are you waiting for?” and took me months to put that thought on paper.

Stats

2015: 13 posts
2014: 22 posts
2013: 51 posts
2012: 49 posts

Projects

My strategy for this year was to grown instead of create. What I mean is: instead of building dozens of new small projects I decided to invest more into those project that already cause a big impact and improve them to become even bigger.

That worked pretty well but I just can’t stop creating new things :P

Highlights

CustomElements.io, redesigned in May.

Super proud of what we accomplished not only in terms of UI but also in terms of infrastructure. Read more about this launch.

Clipboard.js, launched in September.

By far the most popular project I made this year. Widely praised and adopted by huge players like Bootstrap 4. Read more about this launch.

Dracula Theme, redesigned in October.

A little piece built during Halloween.

Stats

CustomElements.io: 657 stars on GitHub
Clipboard.js: 10,319 stars on GitHub
Dracula Theme: 1,510 stars on GitHub

What's next?

Same as last year: hard work.

I have defined some OKRs for 2016 but those I keep in secret :P All I can tell is that 2015 was incredible and I’m sure 2016 will bring even more exciting stuff. Thank you for reading and being a part of this.

Where we are and what’s to come

2015-12-17T00:00:00-08:00

2015 has been an incredible year for CustomElements.io.

I’m incredibly proud of every single step we made as a team and extremely grateful for having such a vibrant community around us.

This story is about how we went from this image below to what we have now and what are the plans for 2016.

Continue reading…

How did clipboardjs get 5000 stars in a few days?

2015-10-02T00:00:00-07:00

On Monday I open sourced a SUPER simple Copy to Clipboard library.

Everybody went crazy.

Today is Friday and there are more than 5,000 stars on that GitHub repository.

Somebody asked me “how did the repo achieve this impressive feat”? And few people answered that it was because of Hacker News.

Continue reading…

How talks affect an open source project?

2015-08-03T00:00:00-07:00

Good documentation, readable code, great performance, intuitive APIs. These are few things that differentiates a successful open source project than just another GitHub repo that nobody cares. But what if you’ve done all that and still nobody is paying attention?

Unless you’re a rockstar developer or a well-known company, you’ll need to promote your new thing. I know, I know, you’re an engineer, “promoting” is a curse word for you. Well, I’m sorry to tell you that but “build it and they will come” doesn’t work these days.

Once you accept that promoting is a necessary “evil”, there are many ways you can explore that like sharing on social media, reaching out influencers, writing articles, recording screencasts, and so on.

You can even go a tech conference and give a talk! Sounds scary, right? I know, I know, public speaking is tough and talking in front of other people can be intimidating. However, if you face that fear you’ll see how it’s actually a pretty rewarding experience.

Conferences are unique opportunities to promote your thing because there’s a lot of excitement going on. Attendees are simply eager to share something new to their followers and peers.

But how can we prove that? How can we demonstrate that creating an open source project + giving a talk about it = growth of community interest? How can we evaluate interest after all?

Driven by my endless curiosity on to how to measure developer relations success, I did some data mining to find out how the answer. Let’s explore two relevant open source projects from two big players in the tech industry.

Continue reading…

2015-07-16T00:00:00-07:00

In the past article, we saw some numbers from the first quarter. That was nice because we could see exactly what was happening on each channel: Site, GitHub, and Twitter.

Today, we’re not only analyzing what happened from April 1, 2015 to June 30, 2015, we’ll also compare those numbers with Q1 to check what we did right and what we can improve.

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2015-07-14T00:00:00-07:00

WebComponents.org is a community project. We truly believe that in order for something to be fully embraced by the community, it needs to be transparent. Starting from now, we’re going to share statistics that are often not publicized by other open source projects.

Hopefully, those numbers will help you understand where we are and where are we going. More than that, it can give you some insights on how we can make this better together.

Today, we’re going to measure what happened from January 1, 2015 to March 31, 2015 across few different spectrums.

Continue reading…

Liferay Front End Meetup

2015-06-17T00:00:00-07:00

At Liferay we have more than 600 employees spread in 18 different offices all over the world. Some of these people work with similar stuff but they may not interact with each other since they are working in different projects.

This is an interesting problem to solve.

Many companies think that just by using an instant messaging tool like Slack you’re covered but the truth is, nothing replaces human interaction.

Continue reading…

Discoverability for Web Components

2015-05-26T00:00:00-07:00

In a world where you can create your own <awesome-button> tag and distribute it with a simple <link rel="import" href="awesome-button.html">, a whole range of options for composability and reusability emerges.

Web Components are coming and there are many challenges coming along. How we connect component authors with component consumers is one of them.

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Why Web Components?

2015-04-26T00:00:00-07:00

By now, you may have heard a lot of things about Web Components. Some people say it’s the promise land, others say it has been oversold.

Although they’re not going to solve all your life’s problems, they do provide a paradigm shift from the traditional approach of web development.

If you still aren’t sure about what exactly is Web Components or even why you should care about it, this article is for you.

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JavaScript Event Handlers

2015-03-18T00:00:00-07:00

Have you ever wondered what’s the difference between this:

elem.onclick = function(e) {}

…and this:

elem.addEventListener('click', function(e) {});

They do the same thing, right? First listen for a click event, then execute a callback function. In fact, they’re slightly different.

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