2019: A Year in Review

Every year on this blog, I try to do a year in review¹; a look back at the year that was and looking forward to the year to come.

This year started out badly, but ended up being the greatest of my journey so far.

Let's break it down.

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2019 Goals

• Get gainful employment
  • I did it (opens in a new tab). This was the best part of the year, hands down.
• Interview with two companies a month
  • Did not do this and am kind of glad. I applied several places and had an interview with maybe two outside of where I am currently working. It all worked out in the end.
• Use Twitter to network with more companies
  • This is how my former boss connected with me, sort of finding me on DEV listings (opens in a new tab) and hitting me up on Twitter. From there, we started the interview process. This still holds true, however I am doing more on LinkedIn as I try to limit my time on other, less relevant social networks². It has been a really great way to stay engaged in the industry.
• Learn more about Data Structures and Algorithms in JavaScript with courses by Colt Steele and Kyle Shevlin
  • Not quite.
• Reapply to [big company] if not gainfully employed by end of April
  • I was not employed in April but I didn't feel good enough to reapply to the [big company].
• Get better at GraphQL
  • Nope
• Get familiar with Typescript
  • We use this for one of our projects at work and I am familiar with it but not good at or competent in it.
• Learn a new concept weekly and write about it on this blog
  • Nope
• Create a new egghead.io lesson monthly
  • LOLOLOLOL Nopeeeee
• 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 it
• Make first PR to reactjs by the end of April
• Make first PR to gatsbyjs by end of June
  • Nope to all of these. I did contribute to reactjs/reactjs.org but that was about it. I created one open source project (opens in a new tab) that wasn't specifically code related and am currently working on a couple more.

I was way too ambitious about what I could accomplish this year but I was desperate to start my career and felt like I could stop at nothing to move the needle. Luckily I got a job midway through the year and didn't have to burn the candles at both ends to get where I wanted to be.

2020 is different.

2020 Goals

I want to learn new languages and get better at my current stack. So these goals reflect all of that. These are also S.M.A.R.T goals as well.

• Get up to 5% proficiency with Go by watching a course 2x a week for an hour
  • I really want to extend my knowledge with other high level backend languages. Go has intruiged me for a long time now and I want to at least get familiar with it.
• Attend a React or JS conference
  • Hopefully at the end of the year or around the end of the year I will be able to do this.
• Get up to 30% proficiency with GraphQL by watching courses 3x a week for an hour
  • I am currently working on a side project creating a REST API to consume in the front end of some app. I'd like to be able to create a GraphQL schema to use as an API for some other project. GraphQL is picking up steam so I feel it is best to learn it.
• Get up to 80% Proficiency with React by watching courses for 1 hour 5 days a week
• Create 4 lessons on egghead
  • Gotta get my game up.

This is it for now. I will probably update this every quarter as I am doing in my app of choice, Notion (opens in a new tab). But this is all I can do right now and I am okay with that.