2 min read

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.

  1. We’ll see how that works out. ↩

  2. I have like four I need to finish this month first though. ↩