End of Year Wrap-up and 2019 Goals

Let's start this post off with a bit of honesty:

This year has been hell, emotionally, mentally, physically, and professionally.

I will be glad to see this year flame out in glorious fashion. I won't miss it. But this post isn't going to be a pessimistic one and instead pragmatic, looking back at the triumphs and professional letdowns of this year.

At the end, I will be laying out my professional goals for 2019. You down? Good. Let's talk.

2018 Goals Rewind

• 2018 Goal 1: Get hired as a junior developer
  • Progress: did not happen.
• 2018 Goal 2: Move to a nicer home
  • Progress: happened. The best part of the year. I love this place.
• 2018 Goal 3: Stop worrying about vanity metrics for the blog
  • Progress: Yes. For the most part.
• 2018 Goal 4: Learn...a whole bunch of stuff that was unrealistic to learn all of that in the first place
  • Progress: Learned React and some GraphQL, which isn't even on this list. Played around with Gatsby.
• 2018 Goal 5: Gain another 300 followers
  • Progress: done.
• 2018 Goal 6: Create some interesting and useful libraries and open source them
  • Progress: Created some but they aren't finished. Need to get on that.
• 2018 Goal 7: Dive more into CSS and WebAnimations API
  • Progress: Nope.

Basically this year was a failure: the main thing I wanted was to get hired and I failed at that. I feel like this year the tides will turn though.

2019 Goals

These are SMART goals in Notion but I skipped the do by in this section for brevity

• Get gainful employment
• Interview with two companies a month
• Use Twitter to network with more companies
  • Twitter has been more effective than LinkedIn. If you're a developer, get a decent following on Twitter. You'll thank me later.
• Learn more about Data Structures and Algorithms in JavaScript with courses by Colt Steele and Kyle Shevlin
  • Need to finish these by the end of March if I'm being honest
• Reapply to [big company] if not gainfully employed by end of April
• Get better at GraphQL
• Get familiar with Typescript
  • It's unavoidable at this point
• Learn a new concept weekly and write about it on this blog
• Create a new egghead.io lesson monthly
  • Create a full course each quarter¹
• Contribute to devtools.html weekly
• Contribute to wp-calypso weekly
• Contribute to learn-code-from-us weekly
• Create a new project every quarter and open source it²
• Make first PR to reactjs by the end of April
• Make first PR to gatsbyjs by end of June

Whoa There Pa'tna. That's A LOT OF GOALZZZZ

Yeah I know but I feel like I did f all this past year it was so taxing on me. I need to ramp things up. So that's why all this.

What's Your Plan Look Like?

Let me know by hitting me up on Twitter (opens in a new tab).