It's good to have goals. Without goals, you're aimlessly wandering around on this space rock with nothing to do and no one to answer to. Some folks like that but I'm not one of them--I like having goals, for near and long-term. I have career goals that I work on with my manager, these are overall professional and community goals to help me personally grow.

I got a lot done in 2016 and continued the trend in 2017, let's break it down and end with my 2018 goals.

2017 Year in Review

Life

• Achievement Unlocked: Father. My son was born in February!
• I started a new job at Target in August

Publishing

Some very exciting milestones were reached in 2017: my first course was published and I became a Pluralsight author!

• I published my Introduction to TypeScript course on January 31
• In October, I accepted a contract to author my first Pluralsight course on RavenDB 4! It's almost done so I will be an "official" author in 2018. This was a huge accomplishment!

Open Source

Overall, I'm still finding time to contribute to open source. My number of contributions was lower than 2016 but this year I had a new baby so I figure that's pretty good!

• 34 PRs closed for Excalibur.js
• 840 contributions in 2017
• In April, worked on "I Just Wanted Groceries" for the Ludum Dare 38 game jam
• In October I started streaming every other Thursday on Twitch, working on OSS projects. I did 4 sessions with 3 recorded videos.

New Tech

• I got my first Raspberry Pi and built a baby monitor. My guide continues to be my most popular article on my site!
• Played with GraphQL and continue working with GQL full-time at work (it's awesome)
• I'm using "older" AngularJS at work but integrating it with modern tools
• Messing with Drone CI at work
• Did some Ansible earlier in the year
• Did some VSTS extension stuff
• Did some Git LFS stuff with Powershell and DSC

Speaking and Conferences

I already reached one of my goals for 2018 "on accident," which was doing a workshop.

• In December, I revealed I'll be doing a half-day workshop at MinneWebCon 2018 on Azure bots
• I spoke at Midwest.js 2017 on React and TypeScript
• I attended MS Build 2017 which was a lot of fun
• I gave the same talk from Midwest.js at Target's internal "InnerConf" conference

Games

• Made a game for Ludum Dare 38
• Finished Horizon: Zero Dawn, Dishonored 2, Life is Strange, and Super Mario: Odyssey. Haven't beaten Zelda yet.

2018 Goals

In 2016 I didn't lay out my goals in a post, I had them in my head. I'd like to write them down here so I can compare how I did at the year end. Let's do it!

Primary Goals

• Publish 1 more Pluralsight course (DONE)
• Host a half-day workshop (scheduled for April) (DONE)
• Participate in a LD game jam (DONE)
• Attend and present at 2 conferences (DONE and DONE)
• Attend and present at a local user group (DONE)
• Finish KTOMG UI revamp with React (DONE)
• Continue doing code livestreams
• Publish another Pi guide for a project I have in mind

Stretch Goals

My primary goals are based on previous milestones that I think I can continue. I also want to have some stretch goals to work towards:

• Become a Microsoft MVP: I spread the love around TypeScript and Azure a lot in my talks and work, I'd like to work towards becoming an MVP.
• Nominated, but nope. Unfortunately, somehow my MVP nomination fell through the cracks and I didn't hear back until September this year. They advised me to re-submit. 😞
• Publish 2 more Pluralsight courses: I'm confident I can do at least 1 course in 2018, I'd love to do two!
• Yes! Almost. I ended up doing two courses at once this year.
• Host a full-day workshop: This one will be a tough one but with a half-day workshop goal already in progress, I should try for a full-day--even if it's at work and not publicly. Target hosts internal workshops and I've already signaled my intent to do one for 2018.
• Nope. Work's been busy with a new release so while I want to start this soon, it won't be in 2018.
• Stream 10 sessions: I streamed 3 sessions in 2017 and took a holiday break. In January I want to start back up and continue it for the rest of the year, if I can make it work.
• Nope. Ended up not having the time/energy to do this.

Phew, that's a lot! We're going to see if I can achieve some of these in 2018 and what ends up carrying over to 2019. Good luck working towards your own goals for this new year!

Updates

Throughout the year I've come back and updated this post and am pretty happy about my progress! 🎉 I'll do another year in review in December to share more reflections.