This year is coming to a close which means looking back and setting some new goals.
2022 achievements
The past months have been a bumpy ride for my professional career and for my personal life.
For my personal life there were some difficulties finding the right balance between work, personal time, and time to expand my personal skillset.
Just before may I found the right balance between work and personal time which gave me some air. We got better at planning stuff and as a result our communication on pain points became better.
On the professional side I got promoted to senior engineer in April which gave me confidence boost.
I've also had the pleasure to guide an intern in his progress to finish his education which gave me a lot of insight in my own mentoring skills.
And I've expanded my personal skillset with the focus on Front-end development. Reason for this shift is because I think I am at a point in my career where I want to move away from PHP/Laravel development, and focus more on frontend development to gain an even broader skillset.
Projects
Because I am shifting my focus away from PHP/Laravel and more to Front-end ( specifically NextJS/Strapi ) I've rewritten my website using NextJS with Strapi as my backend CMS.
I am doing this specifically in a monorepo way which allows me to keep all the moving parts in one spot. The main reason why I do this is because I am not running a large application so this is sufficient.
When I got the basic setup working I created another project for my daughter to help with learning for school assignments.
This project allows me to create basic courses with multiple choice questions which allowed me to learn more about state management, data fetching in NextJS, and some additional hooks.
And the last month I created a simple Expo app which allows me to easily keep track of multiple timezones and their current times. I still need to publish the app for iOS but the cost for the developer account feels a bit too high at the moment.
Goals
While I normally try to stay clear of setting goals I like learning more about some directions that I would like to explore and just creating stuff.
My main directions that I am going to explore are:
- Gaining more skills to figure out if I want to fully focus on front-end development.
- Create some additional projects.
- Reading more into engineering management.
- Finishing my ElasticSearch course.