This year has been challenging and rewarding, and, above all, transformative to both my professional career and personal life. It's hard to imagine that some weeks from now it will be January already. I was in a totally different place last January, and I would like to use this post to share a bit about the journey I took to get where I am today.
Open-source releases
If you follow my open-source work, this one won't strike you as a surprise. This year, I finally shipped two ginormous projects: Mock Service Worker 2.0 and mswjs.io redesign. I started work on both of those last year, and it kept dragging on for ages, as it often happens with pet projects. I cannot express how happy I am that they are done. Every time I catch myself on that though, I smile. That kind of happy.
I'm extremely thankful to all 100+ contributors who helped make MSW 2.0 happen by trying out the release candidates, submitting issues and feedback, and providing encouragement when the hour seemed most dire. You are truly the best.
One would think the week I finally made the announcement would be the week of relief. It couldn't have been farther from the truth. I could barely sleep a couple of days after showing my year-worth of work to the world, how excited I was. Well, that's a good lesson for me to manage announcements better in the future.
The announcements were met with an extremely positive reception, and it made me proud of the work we have accomplished together in bringing API mocking closer to the platform. That was a tremendous amount of work, communication, and discipline. Some may even be wondering how on earth have I managed to do it. The answer is rather simple, really.
Career changes
Since this fall, I've been officially jobless. I took two lay-offs in one year rather hard, given I've cultivated a strong employer dependency being a foreigner. In fact, that dependency was so strong I kept feeling it years after I became self-employed. It's nasty.
And so when the news came I had a choice: take out that warm resume for another spin or see the situation as an opportunity. Now, one could hardly call the lack of income an opportunity, but bear with me. There have been two projects on my mind I kept dragging on for almost a year. One about a grand refactoring of a particular API mocking library, and another a full redesign of its website. And since I happened to have some savings to burn, I decided to take a month and tie the loose ends once and for all.
I earn money from my GitHub sponsors. I earn money from the ads on mswjs.io. Back then, it was about $400/month in total. I was making more on a part-time designer job when I was a kid than I did writing industry-leading open-source software used at Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Vercel, and literally thousands of other companies. I had to find an alternative way of income.
That led me to try something I wanted to do for years. Teach. I spent the first month of my unemployment finalizing and recording my Egghead course on API mocking. I got the opportunity to make the course last November, and have been drafting and brainstorming on it ever since. I am immensely proud that it's finally out. I am infinitely grateful to Joel, Zac, Creeland, and all the wonderful folks at Egghead for not only making my dream a reality but also making that dream support me financially. Those are the true artisans of their craft. I'm looking forward to working with them again.
Publishing on Egghead did loosen the knot of financial instability around my neck but the cost of living was still high. I wasn't quite sure how it would all turn out, and whether I wasn't losing precious time. Time I could've spent looking for a job.
Sponsorships
Until I got an email. See, during the year I've been exploring the ways to improve the sustainability of MSW through sponsorships and grants. While my efforts to reach out to companies using my projects where met with radio silence, I got lucky to be accepted in the Codacy pioneers program, as well as the AppWrite's OSS Fund! And just a few weeks prior to this post, the folks behind Workleap went on the open-source sponsoring rampage, which included Mock Service Worker on their list.
All of those were astronomical. I frankly at a loss how those came to be in the most difficult time of my career but I'm grateful those companies made the decision to support my work. Sponsorships aren't meant to last forever but I will do my best to make them count while they last. What will happen to MSW and my open-source involvement after that, well, I try not to think about it.
I believe I can bring a lot of value by focusing on my open-source work. I love what I do and it means the world to me if it can bring back enough not to care about groceries or rent. Little dreams.
If you use MSW at work, please consider bringing it up with your management to Support the project on GitHub. You will be making an actual difference where companies like Google and Amazon fail. If you decide on it, I will do my best to endorse you. There should be more companies supporting open source, not just me.
Public speaking
This year marks my return to speaking at conferences in person. The kind folks behind TestJS Summit invited me to speak at their event for the third time in a row, this time on-site in Berlin. Despite the difficulties with commute, this has been one of my top conference experiences thus far. I had a chance to meet my friends from Replay and Chromatic, had a few dozen chats around open-source and whatnot, and gave my talk on MSW and standard-driven API mocking. I believe it was received well.
At the beginning of my talk, I did a quick poll of the audience. I asked people to raise their hands if they heard about MSW. Frankly, I was expecting a few stray hands at best but when almost the entire audience reached for the ceiling it threw me off guard a bit. It was a touching moment
I learned a lot from this experience, and I hope to continue improving my speaking skills in the years to come. CFPs have been sent.
Looking ahead to 2024
I spent the last month head-deep planning and working on things that will see the light of day next year. Some of them are those nice things postponed for way too long. Some are gems I'd like to see properly polished. And there are also some so grand I'm still in the process of comprehending the opportunity I've been given.
But there is one thing that 2023 taught me that gives me confidence about it all. If I could accomplish more in a matter of a single month than I did over the past three years then, perhaps, I'm steering in the right direction.