2019 in Review

I didn't officially record or publish any goals for 2019, so these are based on memory and hindsight - which means I accomplished most of them. Yay!

Top 9 Instagram photos from 2019 (1-3).

2019 Goals

Get a new job ✅

This was a goal that had rolled over from 2018. With my wife starting medical school soon (a.k.a. this year), I was hoping to find a more remote-friendly company. I wanted to be free to easily move to wherever her school of choice would be. In February, I landed an interview at Walmart Labs and got a position on my first fully-remote team. I'm less than a year in and enjoying it!

Read books ✅

I've been having a hard time reading books since college despite being an avid reader growing up. Notable books I read this year:

I've been averaging less than 10 books a year, which is... not great. But I'm glad it's not nothing.

Blog ✅

My website included a link to Medium in lieu of a blog from ~2015 until recently. That changed this year for a few reasons. First, developing a blog from scratch seemed like a fun project. Second, Medium had become pretty aggressive with paywalls, etc, and I wanted to feel like I had ownership over my writing again. Finally, I hoped that doing this work would motivate me to do more writing - my Medium profile had become stagnant. This appears to be have been successful, since I didn't write any posts last year and wrote 5 this year:

Bonus: I hunted down old posts from previous iterations of my website using the Wayback Machine and included them here as well.

Quit Facebook 🟡

While I didn't use Facebook all year, I still have an account. It's currently deactivated, but I can't consider this a success until it's gone... permanently.

Develop an iOS app 🔴

I had hoped to complete an iOS app I'd started working on in 2018 for tracking movies. I learned a lot, but it ended up being a bigger undertaking than I'd anticipated and I was no longer able to dedicate the time required to push it out. I released a working, unpolished beta to TestFlight, but that's as far as it got.

Illustrate ✅

I have an art/graphic design college degree, which means I feel unfulfilled if I don't illustrate something each year. This year I illustrated a few moths and posted them to Dribbble.

Top 9 Instagram photos from 2019 (4-6).

Cool Things

Travel

On top of starting a new job, moving to a new state, and changing nearly everything else in our lives, I also traveled more than ever before. According to Flighty, I flew the equivalent of .9x around the earth this year alone.

2019 in Flighty

Some highlights:

  • January, Imaging USA with White House Custom Colour
  • March, Disneyland with my family
  • April, Walmart Labs meetup in Carlsbad, CA
  • September, another Walmart Labs meetup in SLC
  • October, React Conf

Attended a local meetup

This wasn't available where I lived in Minnesota. It's been very cool to attend a React meetup in Cleveland with developers of varying levels of experience. I've met new friends and learned a lot from the few I've attended already. I look forward to continuing this in 2020.

Twitter bots

I don't have much to show for it, but I worked on my Twitter bots quite a bit. lilt was almost entirely rewritten and the game itself has been expanded. I hope to do more before formally announcing it, however.

Top 9 Instagram photos from 2019 (7-9).

2020 Goals

For the first time ever, here's my list of what I'd like to accomplish during the next year.

Read 10 books

I've been averaging less than 10 books per year. If I can make it to 10, I'll be happy.

Write 10 blog posts

I added this blog to my website in August and averaged one post per month. This should be achievable.

Release the next chapter of lilt

I have a couple goals for lilt. First, I hope to develop a user interface to help manage moves, locations, and items in the game (likely with React). Second, I want to introduce more areas to explore. While the interface would be nice for me, it doesn't add anything of interest for lilt's players. This is why I want to focus on expanding the game first.

Complete 3 online courses

I've purchased a bunch of online courses over the years that I'd like to finish. I hope to finish at least three of these during 2020:

Draw, illustrate, animate!

I want to draw some more comics, create some short animations, etc. I don't care all that much about the format as long as I do some cool visual work. I may even dabble in capital “A” Art again.

Tracking My Goals

I haven't decided how I'd like to track all of this yet. I'm leaning towards posting a bimonthly update to my blog. That would count towards my blogging goal, right??

👋