2019 Goals — April Update

Last year, I wrote a monthly progress update on my goals. I'm doing the same thing for 2019. Previously, I wrote these articles on Medium. Now I'm switching over to dev.to 😄

Achievements

Here, I’ll share the goal followed by the related achievement of the month after the arrow.

Emotional

• Focus on relationships that matter -> Spending time with friends/co-workers

I feel like this month I actually made progress towards this goal. I sometimes say yes or do things because I feel like I should rather than because I want to. This month, I spent more time with high school friends that are important to me and I also spend some time with my co-workers outside of work.

I hope to continue focusing on these important relationships rather than trying to please everyone.

Intellectual

• Read 12 Books -> Finished "The Clean Coder" and "Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations"

One of my co-workers recommended "The Clean Coder" by Robert Cecil Martin and so I started it last month. It was a fantastic book! It made me realize what it means to be a "professional" developer and gave tips on how to work towards that in my career.

I also read "Accelerate...". I wasn't a huge fan. The research was interesting, but it felt more like an academic paper published inside a book. It merely validated my previous beliefs of how important things like CI/CD are in shipping software quickly.

• Launch 2 Products on Product Hunt -> Lots of work on mentored.dev

April was a productive month for mentored.dev! I give some credit to the Pioneer Tournament I joined, which has forced some accountability on this project.

I hope to continue making progress and eventually, ship the first version this year.

Professional:

• Speak at 5 conferences-> Spoke at Magnoliajs (2/5) 🚀

I had an absolute blast speaking at Magnoliajs in Jackson, Mississippi. It was my first in-person tech conference I was speaking at.

The experience taught me a lot. I realized:

1) how down-to-earth tech speakers are
2) jokes/humor can spice up talks more than enthusiasm

That being said, I hope to continue speaking at meetups/conferences and getting better at my delivery.

• Write 6 articles -> Published "The Practical Checklist for Getting a Job"

I had been holding onto this article for a while. I wrote it up for a friend maybe 6 months ago but never got around to publishing it. Instead, I was sharing it with people privately.

Now, it's published and ready to be shared with the community! 😄

That's all folks! Until next month!

[Photo by Stephen Walker on Unsplash]