I know this probably comes a bit late, after all, we are already two weeks into the new year, but after reading a lot of reviews from other people, especially devs, writing about their recap of 2018 and their outlook for this year, I was inspired and finally got around to put my own agenda into words.

This serves a few goals: Firstly, it helps me reach my goal about blogging, that I set out to achieve in 2019 and secondly, it aids me in keeping myself accountable for reaching my SMART goals.

If you’ve never head the term “SMART goal” before, this is a way to set more specific, less abstract goals. (Wikipedia)

That’s how I’making more out of my New Year’s resolutions than just keeping them empty phrases.

My recap of 2018

At my current company, we develop a lot of PHP and admittedly I’ve been at most a mediocre PHP programmer when I joined the company back in August 2017. So my main objective at the beginning of 2018 was to become better at writing PHP. As I was mostly writing frontend code, I also tried dipping my toes into designing a little bit. Although I quite quickly realized that this isn’t really my field of expertise and does not bear as much satisfaction as writing code, I’m happy I gave it a shot.

Becoming a better developer

Throughout the year multiple things happened, that made me a better developer. I started following different blogs, Twitter accounts and became an enthusiastic listener of podcasts. This got me more and more involved in the community, especially around PHP Laravel, so that I can keep up with the latest and greatest things happening out there.

During last year I also took a few online courses, most notably I got myself an account at Laracasts, which is an invaluable resource for everyone trying to get into PHP development with Laravel.

Open Source & Hacktoberfest

For quite some time I’ve wanted to contribute to Open Source projects. Mostly, because I love programming, but also because this is a great way to exercise and help out other members of the community. This year’s Hacktoberfest finally got me started.

I’ve been put off of contributing to Open Source projects, mostly because of there being lots of new things to learn: How do I open a pull request? What are the requirements for contributions? What happens if my pull request does not meet all the acceptance criteria?

Hacktoberfest was a great way to myself started by picking some easy issues and eventually opening my first pull requests.

Since then, I’ve made multiple contributions.

Reading, reading, reading …

Out of the countless articles, blog posts and books I read, Robert C. Martin’s “The Clean Coder” struck out the most and probably is the single best book recommendation for aspiring coders like me.

Although I’ve not been coding professionally for too long, lots of scenarios and problems described in this book, I’ve been involved in one way or another.

It gave me some great insights into how to approach topics related to programming that are not code-specific, like communicating with different stakeholders and acting professionally.

The most valuable lesson though was, that I learned about the advantages of tests and got to experience the joy of Test Driven Development, which I’ve been a fan of ever since.

Personal

The most impactful change I’ve taken from a non-professional point of view happened back in September with me picking up going to school again.

This year I’ve decided that I want to improve my skills by enrolling at FH Hagenberg and studying Software Engineering. As I dropped out of school without finishing my A-Level exams, I decided to gain my qualification by attending evening school for two semesters.

Although going to school 3 to 4 evenings a week while working full time does take up a lot of my time, I’m still enthusiastic about it and I’m looking forward to starting my studies in October.

My goals in 2019

I’ve set myself some ambitious goals for the upcoming year.

• Blog more: I want to write at least 12 blog posts and redo my personal site (https://dominikb.io/) to include a section for blogging
• More Open Source: Double my contributions from last year and best case start maintaining an open source project
• Give a talk at a local meetup group
• Use more keyboard shortcuts: IntelliJ makes this easy with the help of Key Promoter X, an excellent tool that keeps track of your mouse clicks
• Waste less time, become more efficient: This one is probably not as easily measurable as my other goals, but I still feel like it should be on this list.

Recommendations

Podcasts

• http://www.fullstackradio.com/
• https://syntax.fm/
• https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/
• https://darknetdiaries.com/

Books

• Microservices-Patterns
• The Clean Coder — Robert C. Martin