Here are my goals for 2014. Overall I think they're kinda conservative, but given I've got twin babies, I wanted to set something realistic considering the little free time I have.
I've been developing almost 10 years, but have relatively recently started learning Ruby on Rails, so most are related to furthering my progress in that area.
In no particular order:
- Have at least a few live Rails sites under my belt by 2015
- Learn more about server admin, and have an automated solution for Rails hosting (probably learning Chef / Vagrant etc from the "Reliably Deploying Rails Web Apps" book)
- Come up with a solution I'm happy with for hosting Rails apps that my business makes - probably AWS
- Present something (that doesn't totally suck) at Roro Syd meetup
- Move from student to mentor at Dev Hub nights
- Carry out the MicroCourses idea at a RailsCamp & Dev Hub
- Be involved as an organiser or mentor at some Rails community events (apart from Dev Hub)
- Write at least 6 blog posts on dev-related stuff
- Make at least two screencasts (as in, a Ruby / Rails related ones)
- Make a nice responsive admin area theme for Rails, and, ideally, make generators so it can be built easily for each new app. (Or find existing solution to do this - possibly Rails Bricks)
- Make a commit to an open source Ruby / Rails gem.
- Make a few responsive websites using a CSS grid system. (I've done responsive sites manually before, but grids seem much easier!)
- Score higher on the Joel Test, or at least the web dev version of it. (When I first found out about this test a couple of years ago, I was scoring embarrassingly low. I've moved up a decent amount, but there's still room to improve!)