Today, at the end of 2014, I'm looking back at the past months and reflect on the stuff I've accomplished in my professional career. I do this every year because it is a good way to set high level goals and try to achieve them.
This post was written for self-reflection mostly, but perhaps it can give you some inspiration for your technical ventures next year :).
2014 was a good year
Yes, I am pleased with my (technical) achievements this year. I had a couple of goals, and even though I did had a couple of setbacks, I am glad to say I achieved most of them.
Learn Node.js
I started the year with one big goal: Learn Node.js. I spent the first couple of months of 2014 solely focused on this one. I researched stuff like the V8 engine, npm, Grunt, Express, and many more. To top it all off I gave a Node.js presentation on our T4T training day and wrote a small blog aggregator for my company site (check out the code here).
Learn one SPA framework
Another goal was to learn one SPA framework, didn't really matter which one. I focused on Durandal for quite some time and wrote a sizable application with it. But when creator Rob Eisenberg moved to the Angular core team I switched my efforts to AngularJS with him.
And now, at the end of 2014, I'm working full-time on a very large AngularJS project for my client; and gave 5 (or so) presentations about the topic.
Give more presentations
Both a company and personal goal was to get more experienced as a speaker. Since my Node.js presentation on the T4T Trainging day, I now have given more than a dozen talks, to crowds varying from 10 to 100+ attendees.
Be more open-source minded
I also wanted to learn more about Github and the whole idea of the open-source community. This goal wasn't met completely, as I don't know enough about how the whole system works. But, I did publish some projects and contributed a small piece to the Ghost blogging system. So it's not all bad :).
Attend less events (and program more)
I went to two big programming events this year, Techorama and DotJS. Both were okay, but I can't say I really learned much from the talks I attended. I remain a firm believer that my time is better spent in actually doing stuff, instead of watching people do stuff. But the events were fun distractions (especially DotJS was really cool!), and interesting none the less.
Blog more
And my last goal was to blog more and attract more visitor to my site (why write if no-one reads your posts, right?).
I moved from Wordpress to Ghost and redesigned my blog completely. I wrote 11 blogposts this year and have about 50 visitors a day. Not bad, but more can be done :).
Will 2015 be even better?
My list of things I want to accomplish in 2015 is pretty big, but as I take a look at what I achieved last year, I do believe it will be possible. In my next year in programming development I will focus on the things below.
Learn ECMAScript 6
The first and most important goal in 2015 will be learning the new features of ECMAScript 6. Another will be to jump on AngularJS 2.0 when it is released.
Take a deep dive in web security
I love security, but due to the level of complexity I was never really able to do more than scratch the surface. I want to change that by really diving into OAuth, Claims based security and any other security framework that might be out there.
Keep on blogging
I want to drive my blog further!
I have about 50 visits a day, I would like to double that by the end of 2015. I'm going to write 1 post per month and fix some style bugs on my current blog layout.
Presenting
I'm going to keep giving sessions, because I enjoy them and they really drive me to take my understanding of a topic to a next level. But it will not be a priority in 2015, we'll see where the tide takes us ;-).
Collaberate on one big open source project
I really want to get a better understanding of the open-source community. So I'm going to try to collaborate on one big open source project in 2015.
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