2020 in Review

A Year of Rebuilding

Like most of us, Kent C. Dodds started 2020 with plans that were quickly upended. By March, the pandemic had driven his in-person workshops and conference talks online, while his home country confronted its deepest social fissures in a generation. But the year turned out to be one of those rare periods where constraints forced a breakthrough: remote-first workflows opened new possibilities, and the product he'd been chipping away at finally shipped.

Write, Workshop, Repeat

Dodds began the year by revamping his office, including a switch from a custom Google Suite setup to Gmail and a hard rejection of Google Photos. He replaced both with a Synology NAS, which now handles family backups to Backblaze; for a long-time advocate of owning his own data, this was a meaningful move toward privacy-preserving storage.

His main professional focus was on a new workshop series that would eventually become EpicReact.dev. The original plan was an aggressive two-part "Build React Apps" workshop, first delivered live as a five-hour, 9-part Masterclass in early 2020. That month included a memorable scheduling blunder, leaving him three days—not the intended two weeks—to prepare. The mix of react-query, msw, and Tailwind CSS with twin.macro proved a useful stack for the material.

A rare silver lining of the pandemic: the existing Masterclass schedule bought him breathing room as everything else shut down. In total, Dodds delivered 6 remote conference talks and 18 remote workshops, half of which were the Epic React Masterclass parts.

One Blockbuster Course

EpicReact.dev, when it actually shipped, was far larger than intended. The initial two workshops split into four, and an 11th workshop on testing was added. By release, it contained 19 hours of video instruction, 10 hours of expert interviews, 14 articles, and about 6.5 hours of podcast material. The price was set to match a single one of his remote workshops—with purchasing-power parity supported—and early reactions exceeded even his expectations.

That breadth carried a deliberate educational model. Self-paced video kept the convenience, while two additive programs attempted to preserve the feel of a live cohort.

Building a Community, One Checkbox at a Time

Dodds had been looking to move his TestingJavaScript.com community off Spectrum, and when OSS projects started migrating to Discord, he took it as a signal. He built his own server around a custom open-source bot (the kcd-discord-bot), which handles a significant onboarding gateway.

New members chat one-on-one with the bot in a private channel, where they must provide a first name (set as their nickname), confirm email, and explicitly accept the Code of Conduct. They are then quizzed on that acceptance—asked what email reported violations go to—before gaining access to any other channels. The process isn’t just for moderation; it also pulls a profile picture from Gravatar when available.

Almost half of the 7,000+ members regularly participate in conversations on the server, a number Dodds attributes directly to that early screening.

Cohorts and Office Hours

Recognizing that prerecorded content loses the energy of a live group, Dodds introduced KCD Learning Clubs as optional add-ons for people moving through the course in parallel. Thirty-two such clubs have run so far on everything in his learning ideas repository, with mixed but mostly positive results. They solve a specific social problem: how to maintain accountability and peer support in an individualized learning environment.

To solve the accompanying problem—the inability to ask a video course questions—he launched KCD Office Hours, a weekly live-streamed Zoom open to anyone, not just licensees. The format was time-efficient and proved valuable for many participants.

A Year in the Margins

The year's Twitter highlights, in order of impressions, show a mix of humor and professional milestones. The most-seen post pushed back on criticism of paid courses by pointing to the volume of free content and open source work produced. Two JavaScript puns—one about classiness, one about prototypes—also landed well. The launch of Epic React, described as the biggest self-paced React workshop available, came with a 24-hour launch discount. A completely free update to the Beginner's Guide to React was announced in March, and a December post floated the idea of switching all teaching material to TypeScript by default.

Reading, Writing, and Recording

Audio books filled hundreds of hours, largely a re-listening of Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere titles in preparation for Rhythm of War. New purchases spanned fiction, psychology, and self-improvement, including the Percy Jackson series, Antifragile, Freakonomics, How to Be an Antiracist, and Thinking, Fast and Slow.

The writing pace held steady at roughly one blog post per week across the year, with some posts published on EpicReact.dev. Podcasting was equally busy: nine guest appearances, 12 episodes of the Chats with Kent Podcast's third season, and nine episodes of the EpicReact.dev Podcast.

Off the keyboard, a OneWheel logged 1,524 miles, with a top speed of 27.7 MPH—acknowledged as far too fast. One crash, triggered by the board's requirement to keep pressure on both sensors, led to a replacement helmet and wrist guards.

Planning for 2021

The theme for the new year is "planning," inspired by a positive experience with structured daily lists during a year of homeschooling. The goal is to work fewer hours while spending more time with family, which will require the productivity gained by ending each day with a short written list of the next day's objectives on a physical notepad.

Several projects are on the horizon:

• Migrating kentcdodds.com from Gatsby to Remix, likely livestreamed.
• Converting all teaching materials, including old and new workshops, to TypeScript.
• Building a dedicated TypeScript workshop series.
• Restructuring TestingJavaScript.com to a workshop-based model like EpicReact.dev.
• Updating EpicReact.dev to the latest dependencies, notably incorporating react-query v3, with a possible move from Emotion to Tailwind.
• Adding new workshops to EpicReact.dev.
• Producing Season 4 of Chats with Kent.
• Continuing weekly blog posts and daily 3-minute podcasts.

Significant new or updated workshops will be refined in remote sessions before being recorded, with announcements posted to the workshops page.

Looking Ahead

2020 was difficult for many people, and those challenges have not disappeared. The hope is that circumstances will improve, and there is a focus on what the future brings. A commitment to making things better for others remains central, even as time and energy are managed more carefully. Some activities have been scaled back to support that goal.

There is confidence that by concentrating on what matters most, individuals can continue to have a positive impact on the world. Best of luck with that work.