The 2021 High Level Road Map

Last year was a busy year I achieved a lot looking back on it, but not what I had planned for. With switching jobs and many challenges over the year a lot of my learning goals morphed into new objectives, still equally as valuable but shifting myself away from my previous objectives. This year I aim to put together a high level road map of where I want to go and what I want to achieve by the end of the year.

Self Development

2020 saw me start to read more books, and more none-fiction I am going to keep that going this year and aim to read through more none-fiction books that aim to inspire and improve my own ability. The Six key books I will get through are:

• The Everything Store
• Steve Jobs
• Thinking fast and slow
• How to win friends and influence people
• Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

I will also continue to dedicate a lot of my other reading time to reading more tech focused items from medium and the likes to try and keep up with the modern going on, so no really change on that front.

Coding

A lot of my free time this year will be to build out the larger project I started at the end of 2020. I believe I need something bigger to work on and the platform is Electron with React and Node all in Typescript. I believe this gives me a good broad range of technologies that I will be working with and the project scope is one that can be almost indefinitely expanded upon. I work on large projects in work both at Hooq and now in Chinsay, however a lot of the challenges with setting up and developing something bigger are areas I am not so familiar with and believe to keep growing and pushing myself I need something bigger that I can dedicate a lot of time to. I do also hope that this project will yield some potential revenue streams, although that is more a hope not a major reason I want to do this, the large part will be using it as a core portfolio piece and something I can put my name to which is important moving forward and upwards.

I am sure there will be other smaller things I play with over this year but my key focus will be around my electron app with the hope to get a pretty good first release done before the end of the year with an MVP in Q1.

I am also going to dedicate a day a week to just working on algorithms and general coding interview stuff. This is one of my weaker areas I am not from a traditional computer science background, which is why this often works against me and I prefer the more hands on stuff but th reality is if I want to acheive my medium to long term career goals and work for bigger tech companies I need to get good at these regardless of how much I dislike doing it. Spending a days worth of freetime on it a week I think will be enough to get me to start thinking in a way that means future interviews will not be as scary and prepare me for much higher level requirements.

One of the big things I feel I need to do is get myself ready to be able to get a new job in any situation. 2020 made me realise even what seemed like a fairly stable company could just fall apart and I was not ready, so I have been saving on an emergency fund for future issues and will also get myself in a state that will allow me to always apply for a new job. I think this just makes good sense anyway as  I don't want to be strongly tied to any one place and you never know what opportunity will come up.

Certifications / Formal Education

I always want to improve my knowledge and formalise it over the year, last year I didn't get any done but this year I want to hit a few key goals in this area:

• Finally get my Scrum master certification
• AWS developer certification

Both will be towards the end of the year.

None Career Goals

I am going to keep up my running with the view of increasing it with longer runs over the year and going to run on the weekends as well.

I also intend to brew more this year as it was a bit of a bust last year, I want to complete at least 6 full beer batches over the year with an aim to learning more about creating my own recipe so at least 2 of these should be my own creations. I also want to learn more about kegging and get a small keg to hold some of my beer.

To increase my investing, open a proper investing portfolio this year along with growing more of my savings and other funds with a view to get a house in the not to distant future, ending the year in a very strong position for whatever the future my hold.

Finally of course to learn more about my son over his 1 - 2 year period and try to dedicate a good amount of time to him and to ensure we are keeping him going in the correct direction

The Wrap

That about does it for this years goals I will aim to check in on this each quater and adjust as required over the remainder of the year, but this provides me a strong basis for where I should start and how to move myself to grow and develop greatly over the year

Photo by Federico Di Dio photography on Unsplash