2015 Career Goals

It’s a brand new year, and everyone is recovering from overspending in December and making resolutions for the year that they may not keep. I took some time out at the end of last year to look back on the highs and lows of 2014, and make goals for 2015 that I will really really really try keep.

Now absolutely anything can happen in a year, so it’s difficult making absolute plans when so much is out of one’s control. I mean, last year, I started off as a devout Microsoft stack developer at the company I work for, to being mainly an iOS developer towards the end of the year. Therefore, many of my goals aren’t necessarily language or technology specific. Anyway, enough talking about them. Here they are:

1. Blog more. I started this blog around the middle of last year to become a world famous and influential software developer who is misquoted in badly written technology articles. The second goal was to document my learning and state of mind at particular points in time, so I can refer to them, and see my growth over time. When starting, I planned to blog every week. That didn’t happen. Now, I plan to blog every week. Write every Sunday morning. Can someone make sure I do it?
2. Test. I’m a big advocate of test-driven development, and writing unit tests. I don’t get to do it much, but this year it will become a big focus. Writing good tests and testable code is a skill that develops the more it is done. Therefore, it must be done more. And this year, I want to try and integrate the practice in my general development workflow.
3. Community involvement. I really need to get involved with the software development community in Cape Town. I’ve seen people write about the benefits of community involvement, and how one learns from what others are doing, and how one understands local trends, etc. It’s a good thing.
4. Contribute to open source projects. Having other people scrutinize the code that I write will only make me a better developer.I am not my code, therefore shouldn’t feel like bad criticism of my code is bad criticism of me (except from some jerks). Hopefully there will be more stuff in my Github repositories at the end of the year.
5. Become a better communicator. I wrote about this some time ago, and still have quite a bit of improving to do.

Here’s to 2015. May it be good.