2014 Goals - A Year in Review

This post is a reflection on my 2014 goals, where I succeeded, and where I came up short. I worked harder in 2014 than in any other year in my life, and I accomplished some of the goals I set back on New Year's Eve 2013. Here are the goals I set for 2014:

• EmberJS
• Speak at a Local User Group
• 52 Weeks, 52 Blog Posts
• Open Source

EmberJS

I went from knowing absolutely nothing about Ember, to becoming a co-organizer of the Ember meetup in Denver, attending the first Ember Conf in Portland, and releasing a few apps into production. All of which are very positive, and I'm proud of the accomplishment.

I'm going to extend this goal into 2015. This time, not just to learn Ember, but to become proficient. Despite my accomplishments, I'm still slow with Ember and I still get stuck and frustrated by seemingly routine tasks. I'm motivated to solidify my skills.

Speak at a Local User Group

I accomplished this goal, writing about it in a past post. Even more exciting is that I was given the opportunity to help run the Ember user group with my friends at Cirro. It's a lot of work to run a user group, even a small one. Just finding speakers on a consistent basis isn't always easy. We made it through almost a full year of consistent meetups, substantially growing the Ember community in Denver.

52 Weeks, 52 Blog Posts

I set a goal of writing a post a week throughout 2014, and I fell drastically short. On the positive side, I feel that I improved as a writer. I spent more time writing than ever before, I completed more posts than I did in 2013, and I like to think they are of higher quality. However, I still came up short of my goal.

Open Source

My open source contributions this year were more than any other year, but that's not saying much. I was able to get small documentation fixes into the three projects of Ember - Ember Core, Ember Data, and the Ember website.

Additionally, I opened up some of my own code. I recently added a small Rails project that makes use of the Rotten Tomatoes API - a project I completed as part of an interview. I also rewrote my Android Vocab Builder app into a Ember application.

Conclusion

2014 was the first year that I've explicitly set goals. I met some, I didn't meet others. Therefore what? Were my goals meaningful, valuable, appropriate? I'll be spending some time with those questions this upcoming week as I prepare for my 2015 goals.