2018 review & 2019 goals

At the very end of 2017 I put together a quick blog post listed down some goals for things that I would like to achieve in 2018.  Now that we've ticked into 2019 I want to review what I put down and list out some new goals for 2019.

2018 in review

Looking at the goals I set I did pretty well over all. Reviewing: 
Speak More I managed, I gave several talks around Newcastle, got selected to speak at DDD Sydney for the 2nd year running and got selected to speak at NDC Sydney. 
Submit More I managed to Submit to more than 5 conferences and was selected for 2 different talks. 
Keep Coding & Keep Working I did both of these things. I'm still happily employed at nib and am still in a role that has me focused on code and systems development.
I did fall down when it comes to Blog More. I only published 6 blogs last year, where ideally I would have liked to have published 12.

Overall 2018 went well I achieved a lot of the goals I set out to. Towards the end of the year after conference season backing straight into Christmas Party season I over extended myself. I think of myself as an introvert. I will be belligerent at a conference, initiating conversations with anyone who stands still for too long but it exhausts me by the end of even a short conference. To recharge I need time to myself at home. In 2018 I think I didn't spend enough time switching off.

Forward to 2019

For 2019 I'd like to make sure to think about my mental health in my commitments, within work, socially and with extra curricular activities like speaking and running the Newcastle Coders Group. Tied into this is an additional focus on my health and fitness. This is likely to take the shape of continuing with my Karate journey. 

For the Newcastle Coders Group. I will be doing my best to keep our regular cadence of the 1st Wednesday of each month going, getting a good range of speakers from local developers and people from other parts of the country, and of course keeping the number of attendees up. 

For Work I want to take the chances that have been given to me to lead projects and deliver good solutions. 

In regards to blogging I'd like to pick up the blogging game and do more of it. Like last year I think 12 blogs across the year seem like a good number. To do this I'll need to be making sure that I continue to push myself into learning new things. Hopefully I'll be given the chance to speak about some of what I've learned. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Testing functions that use local storage with Jest

Testing functions that use the browsers local storage API seems easy when you know how. Here's a quick run down on how to mock it out with Jest if, like me, you're not familiar with how to test it. In the end it's very little code. Consider the following TypeScript code. import { get, save, key } from "./storage"; describe(save, () => { let setItem: jest.Mock; beforeEach(() => { setItem = jest.fn(); Storage.prototype.setItem = setItem; }); it("should call set item with predefined key and json object", () => { const valueToStore = { value: "toStore" }; save(valueToStore); expect(setItem).toHaveBeenCalledWith(key, JSON.stringify(valueToStore)); }); }); The key lines are in the beforeEach call where the setItem function of the Storage prototype is assigned to an instance of jest.fn() . This allows us to make assertions on what is passed to the local storage setItem API.
Read more

Solving `Empty reply from server` in DotNet Core

tldr; If you’re getting  curl: (52) Empty reply from server  check that you’ve configured Kestrel correctly. Long version I’ve started playing with Dotnet Core and Docker and have had a few issues getting started. I’ve had a little bit of experience with Docker, though only a little. I’ve worked with DotNet previously but never with Core. Environment The setup I’m using is a Windows laptop running Vagrant. Via Vagrant I’m running an Ubuntu Virtual Machine with the Docker run time installed. Feels a litle like inception. Key Problem The key problem that I’ve had getting started was having my Docker container not responding correctly to my curl commands. I get this: curl: (56) Recv failure: Connection reset by peer curl: (52) Empty reply from server Given that I’m not all that familliar with Docker or Dotnet Core I decided to remove one of the variables and set up a simple Express app in a different docker container. This validated that the commmand I was usin...
Read more

Can't resolve DNS Aws

Image
I recently registered a domain for a joke website  saladsimulator.com .  I figured I could whip up the page in a couple of minutes and throw it up on AWS using S3 static site hosting.  All done in an hour or so. What I thought would take an hour ended up in a multi-day ordeal while I tried to get the DNS to resolve.  I went through what seem to be the typical problems. The bucket wasn't configured to be accessible as a website. My bucket wasn't named the same as the website; the bucket needed to be saladsimulator.com to match the domain saladsimulator.com . I got these fixed up and found that it still wasn't working.  I added extra routes in to see if I could Alias or CNAME to a known working site, but they didn't work either. So it seemed it was a problem with something to do with the DNS configuration. After searching around I found a mention in a thread that the name server records in the hosted zone needed to match those in the domain name registrat...
Read more