Plans For The Year Ahead

Technology is a forever moving and evolving entity and with it the work. We are required to be always learning and advancing and at this retrospective time of year it is no better time than to start planning for the next year.

There is a lot to consider for the new year I feel I have progressed greatly this year but I need to keep the momentum and look at ways to improve myself and I have a number of ways to do this. Now this doesn't just mean various personal projects, but of course it will include these, I think this will be detailed in a separate post however.

Technologies

In 2020  I want to advance two key areas, I think it is best to keep focused on a few small areas in the general term. I will be spending a lot of time continually on TypeScript/ JavaScript projects largely focused in React learning and following along with the updates as the library develops and evolves with the ability for me to improve my overall knowledge in TypeScript and JavaScript along the way. I have made strives this year to do that especially more recently in looking at lower level JavaScript giving me a better understanding over the language overall, it has proven pretty helpful.

Alongside JavaScript I intend to push my Rust further. I have moved my Rust knowledge this year but nowhere near as far as I would have hoped but definatly moved with a bit of a better understanding as to how to work with it and as it is a system level language it is a bit different especially as I have not much experience in something as low level. Rust I see great potential and proves pretty great performance, I also really like how community driven it is and it comes from Mozilla which is another big plus, I also expect Rust to start picking up in a year or two as we start to get more stable APIs and more frameworks for it.

I hope to spend significally more time with Rust and try to greatly improve my understanding, it is a lot of effort but I think it has a lot of advantages as I start to understand some of the lower level language aspects and Rust at least feels a little bit more of an easy way into that, especially compared to C++.

Certification / Training

One of the main things I want to push is to actually spend sometime getting some more certificates and furthering my knowledge and abilities. There are a few I have been looking at to form at least a minimum amount I want to achieve in the new year and I aim to have the following completely at least before Jan 2021:

• Scrum master level 1 - This is a good first step on the ladder that helps show I understand some agile methodology.
• Docker Certification - Learn more about Docker, Docker is great and I use it everywhere it is high time I actally give myself a qualification in it.
• AWS Cloud Practitioner - AWS is huge and scary and I need to start at the beginning for it, I hope to also move on to the developer certificate later as well

I think these three set me up to a good start of the year. It is my hope that I can get level 2 in Scrum and AWS developer, although maybe I will find some other certificates to pick up along the way.

There will no doubt be other extras along the way and I hope to revisit how far I am along with this in April and see if there is anything I need to do to either keep on track or things to consider adding in later in the year.