This post is not meant to be an exhaustive list of my resolutions (which I do have this year) but rather a place for me to quickly reflect on the past and set some broad goals for the future.
2021 was the year that I finished a coding bootcamp and landed my first paid developer job. It was a year of rapid growth and rapid learning. A year filled with new people and new opportunities. From an internship to a start up to a large tech company, my new career started to take form in 2021. One important aspect of this growth has been learning new technologies throughout the year. I learned React, React Native, Typescript, Redux, Firebase, SCSS, Styled Components, Gatsby, Next.js, and more. I also gained experience in many additional small libraries and packages such as Tone.js and played around with SVGs a lot. Its so crazy to think that I've only been working with some of this for a year now. It certainly feels like longer. Truly insane what a year brings. I worked on a portfolio site, a musician's practice app, a first draft writing app, a contractor app/website, a podcast website, a coffee app that I use every morning, a ride share app, a music theory app, a job website, and started rebuilding my guitar lessons course website. I also got my first freelance web dev clients along with increasing my salary considerably.
Looking forward to 2022, I will be settling into my new role in the new year after a couple months of training and ramping up. It will be interesting to see how my work evolves over the coming year and I am super excited that I get to work with so many extremely smart and talented people. As for my growth and personal projects in the coming year I have plans to finish up a few mobile apps I've been working on as well as the previously mentioned guitar course site. I also want to continue to learn new things. The list of what I'd like to learn/learn better includes: GraphQL (and backend in general), Tailwind, testing, web3 stuff, Mongo and other databases, Astro, Svelte, Typescript, container queries, algorithms/data structures and other CS topics, Docker, and Kubernetes. I expect this list to evolve over the year. I also want to get involved in education in some way. I have many years of music teaching experience and want to find a way to apply what I know about teaching to coding. One way of doing this is to finish my web dev resources blog post! That is on my todo list. I might also consider creating some additional educational materials such as more blog posts, videos, tutoring, etc. When I review this post a year from now I will likely have new goals for 2023. Now to see what I can learn and create in the meantime.