A Look Back at 2016 and Plans For 2017

02 Jan 2017

2016 Retrospective

2016 was a huge year for me. I finished my Bachelor of Computer Science (although my graduation ceremony isn’t until April), got a job, wrote a few blog posts, and made my first contribution to open source.

Goals for 2017

As 2017 will be my first year in a long time that I won’t have study as my main focus, I thought that I would write some goals that I want to achieve for the year.

Code everyday

Practice makes perfect. I would like to keep programming each day to keep developing my technical skills. To help kickstart this habit, I will be partaking in #100DaysOfCode, a challenge for programmers to write every day and tweet about the progress made.

How: Spend at least 1 hour a day programming (outside of work).

Work on Web Development Skills

The web continues to be more and more integrated into almost everyone’s life. While I have had some experience in web development, I believe that I should know a lot more. To do this I will be spending some of my programming time on learning JavaScript, node.js, HTML and CSS.

How: Keep working on FreeCodeCamp, start and finish courses: JavaScript30, Practical Javascript and the node.js path on pluralsight

Blog more

I’ve stated this before in a previous blog post, but I want to blog more. I believe that this will allow me to increase my knowledge in topics that I write in. It will also provide an easy way to share my knowledge with fellow programmers.

How: Release a blog post every 15 days, by writing 100 words a day.

Keep a Journal

“Journals are the Google of the mind” - Zach Holman

I’ve come to realise that the brain is not the best for perfectly storing memories, or keeping ideas for long periods of time. I would like to keep a journal that could store all these ideas, feelings and thoughts. I think it’ll also be cool to look back on journal entries and reflect on what’s happened in my life.

How: Write something (at least a paragraph) in my journal everyday.

Thanks for reading!

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