2014 in review

Just like previous years I’m blogging a little review/retrospective on what I got up to last year, what goals (if any) I managed to achieve and what plans I have for the year ahead.

2014 Goals

As I did so badly in 2013 with my goals I changed tack for 2014 with only 3 main goals:

• JavaScript/SPA
• Code
• Blog

How did I do?

JavaScript/SPA

I did more JavaScript than SPA work last year I just didn’t blog much about it.

I spent a fair amount of time at the beginning of the year looking at UI testing with JS & Node and started writing my own Node “server” mid way through the year.

I have also started creating a talk on noBackend with JS which I hope to be able to give later this year.

Code

Although I wrote some code I didn’t blog about it or push anything new to GitHub, I feel like I didn’t achieve as much as I wanted.

Blog

My goal was to blog 1 article a month which I didn’t manage, I wrote 11 articles which was a big improvement on the previous year where I only managed 4.

What else did I do?

 

Job

2014 was busy again with work I have almost entirely worked on server side C# with almost zero HTML/CSS/JS.

Conferences

I attended the Socrates UK conference, overall I enjoyed it but I came away from it with mixed feelings about the value I had gained from attending. 

I did manage to attend DDD SW, DDD EA & DDD North which was great and as always very enjoyable and I came away from all 3 having learning something new and catch up with people.or

Community

Outside of attending the DDD conferences I have attended my local .Net user groups.

One sad event this year was that .Net Developers Network closed down after running for 7 years, many thanks are due to Guy Smith-Ferrier, Chris MyHill & Andrew Edwards for organising the meetings it for all these years.

Shortly afterwards Bristol DevNet started and has done a good job in carrying on where .Net Dev Net left off and I’ve attended every meeting so far.

Other things

As I indicated in last years post I did stop blogging on Tumblr, instead just posting to this blog.

Coming up in 2015

Thinking about the last couple of years the reason I haven’t managed to achieve everything I wanted to do is simply because I’m spending more time with my family. This isn’t a bad thing but acknowledging it and the restrictions it places on my available time to code, blog, etc is going to influence the goals that I pick.

A while back I read a post from John Resig about writing code everyday even if its only 30 mins. I’m going to take this idea but whilst I’d like to manage everyday I’m not sure in reality I’d make it so instead I’m going to look to do minimum of 30 mins at least 3 days a week towards a goal.

One other thing I noticed was I lost site of my goals during the year so I’m planning on doing my own quarterly review of how I’m doing and if necessary to change goals if I’ve found that circumstances have changed.

Goals

Blog

I’m keeping this as a goal for this year and again looking to try and do a post a month.

Code

Again keeping this goal as I want to try and focus on writing code outside of work.

I have a few ideas floating around about things to do and am currently in the middle of something specific (blog post about it hopefully before end of the month).

Reading

I used to use my train commute to read technical books but working from home I now don’t have the commute and have fallen out of the habit of reading technical books at home.

I have a virtual pile of books I’ve brought over the last couple of years so I’ve plenty of material to read. I’m only going to aim at one per quarter and see if I can actually do better than that.

Conferences

This year I am aiming to go to NDC in Oslo, it may have to be with me as crew but I want to go to this conference as year on year I see all the fantastic content and although I’d love to give a talk at the moment I’m unsure what I could talk about.

Having enjoyed last years conference I’m going to go to back to London JS Conf this year.

I’m hoping there will be some DDD conferences this year, especially as it is 10 years since the first one so would be nice to see an anniversary DDD.

Summary

I did better at achieving my goals in 2014 than in 2013 but still not managed to do everything I wanted.

I’m hoping that with my plans around time to spend on my goals I’ll manage to achieve them all this year.