3 min read

Wrapping up a year is never a thing one wants to do. At least I don’t.

2017 was an amazing year; I built a full-stack app I was proud of with a course and started another. I was a perfect 12/12 months of blogging for the second year in a row. And, at the end of the year I scored an internship with The Practical Dev.

The beginning of this year has been the total opposite: I am being evicted as my apartment building is renovating and will not be renewing my lease and the shine of the internship has worn off as I struggle to find a place to live and get moved. I’ve made some pretty horrendous errors in the face of all this, after a strong start. I am probably not getting offered. I am okay with it now but wasn’t when I got my 2/3 of the way performance review. I was super depressed for a week or two.

But this is not what I want to talk about. I want to recap the year and look ahead for this one and what I can do after I move to turn things around.

2017 Highs After 2016 Lows

Isn’t it how it always is though?

The Good:

  • I completed a full course on web development without a break. I went through the colossal Web Developer Bootcamp with Colt Steele and built YelpCamp which I am not really developing anymore but am tweaking a bit here and there.
  • I started my own full-stack JavaScript app called Check Yo Self which is still in active development. If I am without a position for a little bit while I get settled into my new place so be it. I’ll continue to work on this app.
  • I got offered the dev.to internship.
  • I gained 300 Twitter followers which opened up a whole new network to me I didn’t have previously. This has been a boon to my job search.
  • I was on the Developer on Fire Podcast. It was super fun talking to Dave Rael again.

The Bad:

  • Couldn’t finish school.
  • That’s it!

Goals for 2018

I am currently looking for positions outside of dev.to. I enjoyed my time there but if I am being honest the way I utterly messed up after they gave me a chance…not even sure if I can look them in the face. I will have to, but it will be hard. Really hard1.

I am not a quitter though so while this is a setback it is a minor one and thanks to my friends and mentors Craig Lang and Pablo Rivera I am not dangling off the edge as much as I was. They’ve been instrumental in lifting my spirits.

Without further ado, goals.

  • Get hired as a junior developer working with a primarily JavaScript stack. Rails is okay as I built a Blog app in it, simple CRUD without auth or limiting certain interactions with certain users2. I’d prefer JavaScript though as I am more familiar with it3.
  • Move to a nicer home. This place is shite. So I am glad I need to move. It is just finding a place within the amount of time I am allotted that is the issue.
  • Stop worrying about vanity metrics for the blog. Pablo explained to me that if I’m not selling anything, looking at my analytics isn’t going to do anything for me. Traffic without a product is all but meaningless.
  • Learn: React, Redux, Angular, Typescript, Vue, Vuex, built-in JavaScript APIs and other JavaScript frameworks. I just bought Wes Bos’s React for Beginners course and am excited to dig into it.
  • Gain another 300 followers.
  • Finish Check Yo Self. I need to find time to work on side projects without burning out.
  • Create some interesting and useful libraries and open source them. This will be interesting considering everything I hear about women getting shut down in open source. We’ll see.
  • Dive more into animations with CSS and WebAnimations API.

There Are Probably More

But I am tired and can’t think of them right now. These are the main things I want to get done this year.

  1. Saying that made me start to cry. I’ve been crying a lot lately. It’s been really hard to know your shot at developing full time is dashed for a bit. I’m down, but not out. ↩

  2. For instance, anyone can delete a post by any user. Any user can delete a user. It was basically just an exercise for me to show I can navigate around a Rails app and am able to use my theoretical knowledge of OOP and MVC to a real world app. ↩

  3. I plan on learning other stacks as well. Learning Rails has been a fun experience even though it isn’t my preference. ↩