2017
What a horrible year, both personally and professionally.
First, early on in the year, my wife had to have a double mastectomy due to a breast cancer diagnosis. Needless to say, the first 6 months of 2017 were spent healing - both body and mind. And, really, the mind is ongoing for this one. Thankfully, she is healthy, and cancer free.
In July/August, I took a break from social media, blogging, and pretty much any other extra-curricular activities. I cancelled all my accounts (deleted in cases where that’s an option), and just enjoyed being with my family.
In the latter part of 2017, it gets busy with the holidays and travel - but we did manage to pay off some more debt before the end of the year, which was awesome. It was also during this time, I decided to get back online and get back to business with blogging, twitter, etc. I did decide, right before December, that I would participate in the 2017 C# Advent that my buddy Matt Groves coordinated. I wrote a “quasi” C# post (the code examples were written in it :) ), but was primarily about Visual Studio and Live Unit Testing feature.
That was pretty much 2017 in a nutshell.
2018
With 2017 over, it’s time to look ahead and plan some 2018 professional / career goodness!
I want to keep my goals for 2018 fairly simple, and try not to go overboard.
Here we go!
1. Publish 12 Blog Posts (1/month)
This one is easily measured, and not much of a stretch goal, especially since I’m going to count this post for January :)
2. Release the “Couchbase Explorer” extension for Visual Studio
The development on this has already started, and the basic extension is there. I’d like to release the first version before the end of the year. All it has to do:
- Allow server connections to be saved
- View the buckets in those servers
- Retrieve a read-only listing of documents in the selected server
That’s all. Slap 1.0.0 on it, and ship it. Then, we iterate.
3. Live Stream
I’ve already done this a few times. Neither time did I have any viewers, but that’s okay, because the streams easily get republished to YouTube and Twitch for later viewing, which is nice.
Ultimately, I’d like to live stream twice a month, and by the end of the year, have 100 followers on Twitch.
4. Videos
Even though the live streams get pushed to YouTube/Twitch for later viewing, I’d still like to publish a few independent videos on software development that wouldn’t be live streamed.
By the end of the year, I’d love to have published a short video for each new feature in C# 6.0/7.0/7.1, with accompanying blog posts. Even though C# 6.0 is “old”, it’s still “new enough” to warrant instructional content (in my mind).
5. Promotion
I’d like to increase my career standing this year. Now, that could mean a promotion at my current employer, or not, I don’t know. I’ve always had aspirations of owning my own software company (product or consulting), so maybe that’s the next path for me.
I think that’s enough. I don’t have grandiose goals like I used to, now that life has smacked my family in the face. Mostly, I want to create content and code.
Stick around throughout the year to see if I’m able to keep up with these goals.
Thanks for reading, hope 2018 treats you well!
This post, "2017 Retrospective and 2018 Planning", first appeared on https://www.codingwithcalvin.net/2017-retrospective-and-2018-planning/