2014 Goals

New Year's Eve is a natural and fantastic time to reflect on the past year's goals, and to derive goals for the year to come.  This is increasingly important as technology continues to change at an ever increasing pace. Learn to prune the old and irrelevant, expand on the solid and good, and gain exposure to the new and exciting. Here are my goals for 2014.

EmberJS

My number one goal for 2014 is to learn EmberJS at a high level.  I spent a significant amount of time in 2013 trying to evaluate the different JavaScript MVC frameworks.  I settled in on Ember for various reasons (and the topic of an upcoming blog post).  The next logical step is to take my base set of knowledge and raise it to a high level.

Part of learning Ember will be to port my Vocab Builder Android app over to be a simple web app.  This project is underway and all of the source code is available on GitHub.

52 Weeks, 52 Blog Posts

As Jason Fried has said on numerous occasions, "Clear writing indicates clear thinking."  It is one of my goals to become a better writer and better communicator of the issues we deal with every day while developing for the web.

I'm committing to writing a blog post per week, many of which will be on my journey with Ember.

Open Source

I've made two minor contributions to open source projects, and have open sourced a couple of half-baked projects myself. In 2014 I'd like to ramp up my involvement in open source and contribute more.

This will fit in nicely with my goal to learn Ember. Digging into a new framework is a great time to view the landscape with beginner's eyes and help with that initial experience. It's a great time to help shore up lacking or inaccurate documentation and learning materials.

Secondarily, I'd like to finish-up my Gilbert and Slovnik projects on Github.  When code is private, it's easy to go 90% of the way and leave it in a state that works, but is lacking testing, or needed refactoring.  When that same code lives in the public, it's much more motivating to get that code all the way to 100%, which is what I'd like to do with Gilbert and Slovnik, whether or not the projects are of any use to anyone else.

Speak at a Local User Group

Finally, I'd like to speak at one of the local user groups that I attend.  Selfishly, knowing that I have a talk coming up is as good of a motivation tool as there is, and a great way to motivate a deep dive on a desired topic.