Getting Back In The Groove
This year has been quite a year a lot of happenee both globally and with my own life as well, it has been a long one but I'll do some year retrospectives eventually now I need to get myself moving with my own personal projects and outside learning once again.
This year has been one long and difficult year it has totally thrown off a lot of my plans and really forced me to change course several times. One of the big changes was my son being born, in December of 2019 which has had quite a bit impact on my own ability to get stuff done outside of working hours, even now I planned to settle down for an hour or two to write this and get some other stuff looked at but he woke up and required some attention making being more productive a challenge.
On top of this my previous job at Hooq disappeared as the company went bankrupt, this forced me to scramble through the COVID period looking for work and I did land something pretty nice but yeah COVID also happened. With my new job working in new areas with some pretty demanding clients it has also killed my motivation to get much done in my, limited, free time. It has really thrown me for a loop actually and I can expect the rest of this year to be pretty hectic and crazy busy as well.
Even with all this and a year that has not really gone to plan I can start to see the light now and with it a bit more time and energy to pursue more awesome projects and new ideas around the edges, including some upskilling in a few areas and really trying to turbo-charge my development career and move it up again to the next level. I have totally fallen off the rails of what I had hoped to get through this year but at the sametime I was able to do all the interview and job circus and land a pretty good job that pays way more than my last one and has some pretty interesting different focus as well, overall it was a good move not that it isn't without its challenges like most things but they are generally enjoyable.
Getting Back On Track
It is probably unfair to say I've not had a productive year and that I haven't levelled up somewhat as I am now working more full stack on a full Azure stack which has given me more exposure to C# and SQL Sever which is really helping me fill in the missing pieces that I had working solely on the frontend. I think the two years just working with React was pretty fantastic as it gave me my specality, Javascript, more specifically frontend JavaScript and this is really important but now I am wanting to move beyond that and this role gives me a much bigger picture of the applications and helps me grow more in other areas which is always a plus.
Though I did quite a few small projects for companies as part of the interview process some bigger and more complex than others but all giving me more portfolio items to add and look at. Though recently my self projects have not really gone anywhere and in some cases I've struggled to find interesting apps to build, to be honest maybe I've been a bit burnt out with everything and spending more of my time relaxing and trying to unwind I think this has helped a lot but I also am slowly feeling the pull to get back into building some awesome new things.
There are a few things that i am pretty interested to try and get moving with some slightly less directly involved in development work, some a bit more devops and of course development projects, although I feel I want to get some small stuff moving first and maybe aim to get a bigger project done in December when I have significant time off and nowhere to go!
I feel a lot of people have been thrown a bit by this year and it takes time to recover and that is ok as long as we keep one eye on where we want to go it is all good, I will follow up this with more of a checklist breakdown on where I am looking to get things moving, I find writting these things down is always helpful and starts to solidify the ideas for me so that is going to lay out my plan on how to get things moving in the right direction and pushing myself a bit more on my own time.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash